Quotes About Robots

Robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly.

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

When I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

There are many joys of parenting, but ultimately we are robots training our own upgrades to replace us.

There is a fundamental distinction, however, between approaches to designing technology to benefit humans and designing technology as an end in itself. Today, that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.

Check your numbers if you'd like," says Jonah. "But if your inventories haven't gone down . . . and your employee expense was not reduced . . . and if your company isn't selling more products—which obviously it can't, if you're not shipping more of them—then you can't tell me these robots increased your plant's productivity.

I say, "So the bottom line is this: to give the robots more to do, we released more materials." "Which, in turn, increased inventories," says Stacey. "Which has increased our costs," I add. "But the cost of those parts went down," says Lou. "Did it?" I ask. "What about the added carrying cost of inventory? That's operational expense. And if that went up, how could the cost of parts go down?

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.

I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings.

In 2003, my mom actually gave me a call, which is funny because she works at the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, and let me know that there's a cool competition with robots across the desert. And I thought this was definitely something I wanted to be a part of. This was the first DARPA Grand Challenge.

The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.

I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are.

Our nano-quadrotor robots are made to be as lightweight as possible: less than a fifth of a pound and palm-sized. They can do an aerial backflip in half a second, accelerate at two Gs, and fly rotor blade to rotor blade in three-dimensional formations - and they do all this autonomously.

I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions. The more doubts they have the better. People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic—they aren't robots. I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia. I don't go for people who lead full and satisfying lives.

Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well.

That suggested two possibilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him—or it was very intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that case, he must treat it as an equal. Even then he might underestimate it—but it would bear him no resentment, for conceit was not a vice from which robots often suffered.

Robots have a rich and storied history in movies.

It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did — without a word — what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?

I read recently that someone set up a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots in America. The idea being that if something robotic can have responsibilities then it should also have rights.

There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.

I see the 'z' in 'Humanz' as referring to robots, AI, programming, brainwashing, indoctrination. And it's a question to us: are we human, or are we humanz? Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves? Do we just believe what we're told? That's how I see it.

A lot of sci-fi shows are very cold, too concerned with hardware.

We will not have humanoid androids. It's interesting: when you start trying to make robots look more human, you end up making them look more grotesque. It takes very little to go from super-attractive robot to hideous robot.