How to Survive a Robot Uprising
by Daniel H. Wilson
Daniel H. Wilson has a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote this book in 2005, which means he was thinking about robot uprisings before it was on-trend.
The book is structured like a genuine survival manual. It covers different threat categories: legged robots, wheeled robots, swarms, humanoids, and military systems. For each type, Wilson provides specific evasion and countermeasure strategies based on actual knowledge of how these systems work.
The advice is real. Avoid open terrain against wheeled systems. Use EMP devices against electronics. Never assume a robot is disabled — confirm. These are things Wilson actually knows.
The tone is somewhere between deadpan humor and genuine unease. Wilson is clearly having fun, but he’s also a robotics expert writing in 2005 about things that are now, twenty years later, actual products being deployed in actual warehouses.
The book aged into something stranger than Wilson intended: a comedy that is increasingly not a comedy. A prequel to news articles. Essential reading, possibly.