The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices

April 25, 2011
In this boosterish but underwhelming prospectus, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's storied Media Lab extols the avant-garde digital technologies erupting from his institution. Some of the projects he profiles, like better prosthetic limbs, are very worthwhile. Others, like a fork that warns you when you're eating too fast, seem trivial and annoying. And some, like digital instruments that let people with "a complete lack of any ânatural musical talent'... experience the sheer joy of making music," are clear public nuisances. (Guitar Hero was a Lab spinoff, the author boasts.) Moss celebrates Lab denizens' "incredible passion" and insists, unconvincingly, that participatory corporate sponsorships (industry employees "collaborate" with the academics) never nudge their "total creative freedom" toward marketable gimmicks. In the background hovers his vision of a posthuman future that's half digital nanny-state, half nouveau-riche daydream for the techno-elite ("A chef in Beijing could work with a robotic partner in Boston to prepare a ten-course banquet in my kitchen"). Moss's hackneyed cheerleading doesn't dispel the impression that the Lab mainly generates overhyped mediocrity. Photos.

July 1, 2011

The MIT Media Lab is an extraordinary, collaborative, multidisciplinary development environment, cultivated by MIT faculty and students to foster creative invention across diverse disciplines such as epistemology, neuroscience, visual arts and design, mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science, music, and the physical sciences. It is a distinctive academic milieu developed partially through relationships with industries that provide funding but do not have exclusive rights to the intellectual property created. The innovation fostered by this approach has led to amazing technological developments, including a robotic prosthetic foot and ankle now used by wounded Iraqi and Afghanistan U.S. veterans; the CityCar, an electric, foldable, efficient car; a gesture-controlled device, the SixthSense, which can transform any surface into a touch screen for computing; and robots that complement human abilities. Moss directed the Media Lab at MIT from 2006 to 2011 and is now the head of the New Media Medicine group at the Media Lab. VERDICT While the book can be repetitive if read cover to cover, it provides an energetic, dynamic description of the lab's groundbreaking process of research and invention. Recommended for science and technology buffs.--Candice Kail, Columbia Univ. Libs., New York

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2011
Technologist, entrepreneur, and academic Moss conducts a fascinating tour of MIT's Media Lab, which attracts the brightest minds of a generationresearch scientists who through it access the full power of information and communication technologies and advances in biological, physical, and social sciences to create inventions that will change the world. He describes the lab's myriad activities and its unique emphasis on personal relationships between people and technology, including sociable robots that provide aid and companionship for the elderly, a computer device that prompts people with chronic diseases to take required medication, a prosthetic ankle that enables amputees to walk with normal speed and effort, and a music synthesizer that uses graphite in a pencil to produce sounds, thus drawing music. The Media Lab's mission is to empower ordinary people to do truly extraordinary things and . . . take control over . . . their health, their wealth, and their happiness. This excellent, thought-provoking book should inspire and inform a broad range of library patrons.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)