quotations about robots
Robot lawyers would make sense given the tricky road we're inevitably facing when it comes to robotics law and maybe even robot rights. If robots become the subjects of laws and protections, then perhaps they should learn how to navigate the system. Of course, as with everything else, we run the risk of being surpassed in skill and acumen by our robotic counterparts. Although by then, robot judges may be banging gavels and silencing courtrooms, as well as naysayers.
JOELLE RENSTROM
"Robots Are Taking White Collar Jobs, Too", The Daily Beast, June 4, 2016
The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become "Golems," they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.
ERICH FROMM
The Sane Society
Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return?
IAN WATSON
A.I.
Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. (Of course, this means giving up on superintelligent robots!) Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone superintelligent machines.
STUART RUSSELL
"Should We Fear Supersmart Robots?", Scientific American, June 2016
First, stop thinking of robots. A robot is a container for AI, sometimes mimicking the human form, sometimes not--but the AI itself is the computer inside the robot. AI is the brain, and the robot is its body--if it even has a body.
TIM URBAN
"The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence", Wait But Why, January 22, 2015
If you make [robots] perfectly realistic, you trigger this body-snatcher fear in some people.
DAVID HANSON
CNN, November 23, 2006
From Icarus to Frankenstein's monster, tales in Western culture warn against outsized ambition and imbuing non-human objects with human qualities. But that skepticism doesn't exist in the East, says innovation and industry expert Alec Ross. It's there that technology companies like Honda and Toyota are creating humanoid robots that do human duties -- like caring for the elderly. This sort of soft robotics may reverse our cultural skepticism toward human-like machines. Meanwhile these robots will completely revolutionize industry. Already one of the world's largest manufacturers has declared it will only hire robots in the future, not humans. So the future is a mix of robotic benevolence and very high efficiency.
ALEC ROSS
"The Robots of the 2020s Will Be More Like Terminator than C-3PO", Big Think,, February 21, 2016
Today, manufacturers are embracing robots to solve labor challenges; soon they will do more.
JIM LAWTON
"Robots Are Boring", Forbes, October 3, 2017
First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world.... Creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a "super-bad robot," someone has to build a "mildly bad robot," and before that a "not-so-bad robot."
MICHIO KAKU
The Future of the Mind
Robot Man, Robot Man, Robot Man
Got me running as fast as I can
In the head you're the perfect machine
There's a hole where your heart should have been
ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK
"Robot Man"
I'm a mad scientist
Wildly laughing
Throwing levers and pushing buttons
Riding an out-of-control
Chemical factory robot
Which is my body.
DAVID MENEFEE & RACHEL ANDERSON
"Chemical Robot", Poems de Terre
Robots do not celebrate anything. Celebration is an expression of joy, which cannot be mechanized.
RAVINDRA SHUKLA
A Maverick Heart
Why did the robot cross the road? Because he was carbon bonded to the chicken!
AKIVA GOLDSMAN
Lost in Space
Sometime in the next 40 years, robots are going to take your job. I don't care what your job is. If you dig ditches, a robot will dig them better. If you're a magazine writer, a robot will write your articles better. If you're a doctor, IBM's Watson will no longer "assist" you in finding the right diagnosis from its database of millions of case studies and journal articles. It will just be a better doctor than you.
KEVIN DRUM
"You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot--and Sooner Than You Think", Mother Jones, November/December 2017
I can almost see the processes whirrling clunkily in his singularix, as his excited nervous system battled with his logic circuits.
GEORGIA CLARK
Parched
The higher the minimum wage goes, the lower the threshold will go for robots to replace humans in many minimum-wage roles.
TOM PURCELL
"Hey, Bernie: The robots are coming", The Hays Daily News, February 23, 2016
With an increasing amount of money being pumped into artificial intelligence and robotics and our growing comfort levels with robot interaction, it's only a matter of time before we will love, marry and have sex with robots.... Once they move and speak and they feel warm, I don't think there will be any problem for people to relate to them.
DAVID LEVY
"Sex robots to become a reality", Toronto Star, June 4, 2016
Ever since robots emerged from the pages of science-fiction novels into the real world, humans have feared being usurped in the workplace. That worry may be more fictional than scientific. A recent study by the VDMA Robotics and Automation Association shows that previous waves of automation have not made labor obsolete. In fact, in Germany, Europe's largest user of robots, increased deployment of machine labor in the automotive sector has coincided with a rise in human employment.
CAROLYNN LOOK
"Robots Are Coming, But Not For Your Job", Bloomberg, February 17, 2016
For the robot classes and masses are only kept sane by the kindness of living women and men.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"Real Democracy", The Complete Poems