Award-winning photojournalists Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio will share images and ideas from their latest project, an examination in words and photographs of the new generation of “smart” robots and the international race to build the first autonomous robot. In the book, Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species, and in a lecture of the same title on Wednesday, October 25 at 8 p.m. in UCSB Campbell Hall, Menzel and D’Aluisio shed light on an emerging and startling reality. Tickets are on sale now at the Arts & Lectures Ticket Office. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of books by Menzel and D’Aluisio will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Around the world, scientists and engineers are participating in a high-stakes race to build the first intelligent robot. Though many robots already exist—automobile factories are full of them—the new generation of robots will be self-sustaining machines that act like living creatures. When they are created, science fiction will have become fact. Robots already walk, talk, dance, and can react to a human being’s facial expressions and verbal commands. Machines are already beginning to resemble us, the book points out; robotic spiders, crabs, geckos and dogs are already spilling from the laboratories. The next step is to re-create the species Homo sapiens itself and then go beyond. Human beings routinely now have attached to or transplanted into their bodies prosthetic limbs, titanium hips and artificial eyes. The term “Robo sapiens” comes from an hypothesized single species that could develop if human beings and the future generation of robots meld into one. Questions remain about whether, when these smart robots appear, they will be our rivals or our partners, and whether they will constitute simply a robotics revolution or a true extension of human evolution.

In the book Robo sapiens, Menzel, who received a 2000 World Press Award for his robot reportage, and D’Aluisio present the next generation of these robots and their creators. Accompanying brilliant photographs of more than one hundred robots is an account of the little-known, yet vitally important scientific competition to build an autonomous robot. The book contains extensive interviews with robotics pioneers, anecdotal “field notes” with behind-the-scenes information, and easy-to-understand technical data about the machines themselves.

Menzel and D’Aluisio’s publications for Sierra Club Books, the best-selling Material World: A Global Family Portrait from 1994 and Women in the Material World published two years later, drew attention to the great range of lifestyles considered average in 30 different countries, from the Kuwaiti family with four cars and a 45-foot sofa to a Haitian family with few possessions other than a bag of sugar cane and millet they’d grown to sell and a tiny, wheel-less toy VW bug. For Women in the Material World, Menzel and D’Aluisio returned to 19 of the 30 countries in the original book, this time with teams of mostly female photographers, to focus on the women who had often remained behind the scenes during creation of the first book.

The couple’s next project was a book called Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects, a worldwide look at the human consumption of insects. It was released by Ten Speed Press in 1998.

Menzel has dedicated a large part of his career to high-technology stories on subjects as varied as virtual reality, insect robots, lightning, DNA fingerprinting, micromachines and solar-powered cars. The extremes to which he will go for a shot are noteworthy, from rising at 4 a.m. to catch the early morning light on a camel fair in India to rappelling the glass of Biosphere II in the Arizona desert or shooting an eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano while the rubber soles of his boots melted. His award-winning coverage of the Kuwait oil well fires ran as a 26-page cover story for German Geo and his photo essay on the civil war in Somalia was one of the first to reveal that tragedy to the world.

D’Aluisio, who is married to Menzel, is a former television news producer with a decade of experience covering stories for local and national television news organizations. She has received regional and national awards for documentary and news series from The Headliners Foundation, United Press International and Associated Press.

This event is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures.

For more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Roman Baratiak at (805) 893-2080.