Book excerpt: Before you get to Homo sapiens, you must first deal with Homo roboticus. Inside all of us is the strangest thing, a biological robot. You notice it during sleepwalking and hypnosis, but in fact it's there all the time. Most people have had the experience of driving from A to B and then realizing they have no memory of actually having done the driving. It just seemed to happen, almost by itself. The robot in fact did the driving. It's the human autopilot and it handles most things. Most people are conscious very little of the time. They are usually in autopilot mode. Thousands of years ago, the autopilot human was all that existed. How we got from the robotic human mode to human consciousness is one of the greatest tales the cosmos has to tell. How did biological robots turn into human beings with free will? And why has no other animal on earth managed the same trick? Come inside and discover the answer to this greatest of all mysteries.