Quotes & Sayings About Robots

Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. Only when free will kicked in could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction. — Kurt Vonnegut

The benefits of having robots could vastly outweigh the problems. — Rodney Brooks

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

At the end of the day, tech workers are not robots: they feel, they think, they have values. — Ed Lee

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots. — Mark Boal

It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth. — Michio Kaku

In the end, robots do things that people can do. So there is a cost above which you can hire somebody to do it, and that bounds the opportunity. — Colin Angle

They said I rap like a robot, so call me rapbot. — Eminem

Well, robots are, of course, the monkey's natural enemy. — Brian K. Vaughan

Human reactions to robots varies by culture and changes over time. In the United States we are terrified by killer robots. In Japan people want to snuggle with killer robots. — Daniel H. Wilson

The consequence of making it a business thing and making an artist the same as a Wall Street trader is that you do get a robot by the end of it. It becomes more robotic as opposed to being more soulful. — M.I.A.

I'm Dr. David Hanson, and I build robots with character. And by that, I mean that I develop robots that are characters, but also robots that will eventually come to empathize with you. — David Hanson

As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes. I don't think they will want to see themselves as digital computers either. To be told by someone with impeccable scientific credentials that they are nothing of the kind can only be pleasing. — John Maynard Smith

If a modified robot were to drop a heavy weight upon a
human being, he would not be breaking the First Law, if he did so with the knowledge
that his strength and reaction speed would be sufficient to snatch the weight away before
it struck the man. However once the weight left his fingers, he would be no longer the
active medium. Only the blind force of gravity would be that. The robot could then
change his mind and merely by inaction, allow the weight to strike. The modified First
Law allows that (79). — Isaac Asimov

Normally, in the presence of radiation, communication links fail. But with autonomous robots, you don't need communications. — Vijay Kumar

I fidget through class, barely paying attention to Mrs. Schumaker droning on about wagon trains and buffalo. I get it. Life on the prairie was tough. Churning your own butter? Yay for the Industrial Revolution. — Mick Bogerman

I've never recognized 'emo' as a genre of music. I always thought it was the most retarded term ever. I know there is this generic commonplace that every band that gets labeled with that term hates it. They feel scandalized by it. But honestly, I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands. The reason I think it's so stupid is that - what, like the Bad Brains weren't emotional? What - they were robots or something? It just doesn't make any sense to me. — Guy Picciotto

Leg locomotion was, for decades, thought to be an incredibly difficult problem. There has been very, very painstakingly slow progress there, and robots that essentially lumbered along at one step every 15 seconds and occasionally fell over. — Stuart J. Russell

Shorn of unattractive language about "robots" who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea that schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of "rigor" and "high standards" that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people's ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own. — Jonathan Kozol

They were here from the beginning.
They have reshaped our lives, run us from our homes.
They were always here. — Nadege Richards

Serafina was late for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown. — Charlie Jane Anders

Where did this baseless fear that robots would attack humans come from? Why were there so many stories about robots and humans fighting? Did they only exist because that was how mankind had always lived? Did we simply see ourselves in these humanoid machines? Were we not simply afraid of our own reflections? — Hiroshi Yamamoto

Two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them - will they need rights eventually? And the other question people ask me is, will they want to take over? — Rodney Brooks

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You'll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. — Kevin Kelly

Let them come. We've got helicopters, tanks, jets, and big guns. We've got armies of robots. What do they have but their stench and the squalor they live in? — Michael Monroe

Raucous heavy metal of punk guitars screeching like robots put to the rack ... — Elizabeth George

So robots are good at very simple things like cleaning the floor, like doing a repetitive task. Our robots have a little tiny bit of common sense. Our robots know that if they've got something in their hand and they drop it, it's gone. They shouldn't go and try and put it down. — Rodney Brooks

I think we should all start worrying about being downloaded and put in robots. — Jane Espenson

the market for consumer robots could hit $390 billion by 2017, and industrial robots should hit $40 billion in 2020. As — Alec J. Ross

How simple everything could seem if one looked only at the figures, those cold statistics that took no account of people's feelings and traditions. How much would be destroyed if men were to be treated as robots! What of the myriad of individual characteristics, passions, aspirations, triumphs and disappointments that together made one people different from another? How could anyone ignore all the different threads of experience that, over the centuries, had formed and deepened the differences that distinguished each nation? — Miklos Banffy

I don't buy into the dystopian scenarios of self-aware robots enslaving mankind, but you don't have to be a sci-fi conspiracy theorist to acknowledge that plenty of good, well-paying jobs are being taken over by machines. — Marco Rubio

One of the main things we have been looking at is, how can we get a robot to think about situations it's never seen before? — Judy Woodruff

It takes courage and strength to be sensitive to things and even more strength and courage to own up to it or be vocal about it. Robots, the only things with a perfect lack of emotional capacity, are easily controlled, and I suddenly realized that's why the military often trains people to suppress their emotions. Unfortunately for them, humans aren't machines. We feel, we love, we cry, we despair, and we rejoice. Anyone who's ever tried to convince me not to feel is someone I shouldn't have trusted. The only reason you should shut off your emotions and emulate a robot is if you're doing horrible things. How fatal my decisions have been. How many people would be loving, rejoicing, and feeling right now rather than crying indefinitely in the depths of the afterlife? If only I'd figured this out sooner. — Bruce Crown

Yes," Lisa said with the usual blank honestly. She frowned. "Was that a sincere question? Or a scolding rhetorical question akin to Harilotecca's speech patterns? — Ash Gray

It's this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what's it made of? It's made of neurons. It's made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation. — Daniel Dennett

Manual control, please."
"Are you sure, Frank?"
"Quite sure, 'Falcon' ... Thank you."
Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, however simpleminded they might be. Whole volumes of psychology, as well as popular guides ('How Not to Hurt Your Computer's Feelings'; 'Artificial Intelligence
Real Irritation' were some of the best-known titles) had been written on the subject of Man-Machine etiquette. 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. — Arthur C. Clarke

Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China's total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today - a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China's wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In — Thomas L. Friedman

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots ... but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement. — Jeanette Winterson

This problem," Rick said, "stems entirely from your method of operation, Mr. Rosen. Nobody forced your organization to evolve the production of humanoid robots to a point where - "
"We produced what the colonists wanted," Eldon Rosen said. "We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn't made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. We knew the risk we were taking when we developed the Nexus-6 brain unit. But your Voigt-Kampff test was a failure before we released that type of android. If you had failed to classify a Nexus-6 android as an android, if you had checked it out as human - but that's not what happened." His voice had become hard and bitingly penetrating. "Your police department - others as well - may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability, such as my innocent niece here. Your position, Mr. Deckard, is extremely bad morally. Ours isn't. — Philip K. Dick

You have to realize that the game is played by people and not by robots. You have to try to get across in the broadcast the difference in personalities of these players, and that's part of the fun, of course, being in a position where you can pass along that knowledge because you represent the fan. — Martin Tyler

As opposed to a movie [Real Steel] where everything feels fantastical, it was really important to me, and I recognise it's not the first movie with robots in it, but that blend of naturalism in performance, writing and design with the futurism of this sport. That was the idea. — Shawn Anthony Levy

Nobody complains that Bernini's sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell's paintings are too creepy. Well, robots can seem real and be loved, too. We're trying to make a new art medium out of robotics. — David Hanson

If the men were without passions, it would be forgivable to see Machiavel try to give some to them; he would be the new [[Prometheus]] bringing celestial fire to breathe life into robots. But no man is without passions. When they are moderated, they are the heart of the enterprise; but when the brake is stripped of them, they are its destruction. — Frederick The Great

Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots. — Barney Oliver

Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance. — Orson Scott Card

I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace, then that uncanny effect will go away. — David Hanson

Robots are good at things that are structured. — Vijay Kumar

Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds. — Daniel H. Wilson

Irony; we want to dance like robots and want robots to dance like us. — Vikrmn

How serious can a movie about time-traveling robots be? You want it to be cool and fun. — Christian Bale

Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far, far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on, based on preliminary successes. — Daniel H. Wilson

Today's young people have grown up with robot pets and on the network in a fully tethered life. In their views of robots, they are pioneers, the first generation that does not necessarily take simulation to be second best. As for online life, they see its power - they are, after all risking their lives to check their messages - but they also view it as one might the weather: to be taken for granted, enjoyed, and sometimes endured. They've gotten used to this weather but there are signs of weather fatigue. There are so many performances; it takes energy to keep things up; and it takes time, a lot of time. "Sometimes you don't have time for your friends except if they're online," is a common complaint. — Sherry Turkle

The girl from the front row grabbed AIMii on the arm. "Remember, it's bumpy."
"Why is the color of silence bumpy?" AIMii asked.
"Because it's hard to do," she whispered loudly. — Mandy Broughton

You have terminated me," one of them said in a strange, flat voice. "But I
am one of many."
"Robots!" Iggy breathed, taking Total from Angel.
"One of many, one of many, one of many," the robot Eraser was saying. Now
Nudge saw the red light in its eyes, saw how they were fading and winking out.
"Good!" spat the Gasman, kicking it hard. "Because we like to blow stuff up,
blow stuff up, blow stuff up! — James Patterson

According to a recent study, depression is described as being the disease most destructive to humankind, largely because of the devastation it wreaks on our lives ... Yes, we could set up our minds to ignore our feelings and barricade ourselves from the winds and dust of the brain pattern. And we could become like robots, refusing to consider the passion and joys that could be ours. But then, we also might as well be dead. — G. Frank Lawlis

I believe that robots should only have faces if they truly need them. — Donald Norman

-The renegade robots are now long dead, the metal ones rusted, the human ones bled. — Irvine Welsh

If you do a single thing - and especially if there is a lot of money in that single thing - you should put a 'Welcome, Robots!' doormat outside your office," wrote technology expert Farhad Manjoo in Slate. "They're coming for you. — Robert Wachter

Sam: You know what I wish?
Cassel: What?
Sam: That someone would covert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me. — Holly Black

Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he'd ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of. — James S.A. Corey

Maybe the answer is: Don't be an asshole, think before you open your trap, take responsibility for your words. Meaning, apologize when you're wrong and correct yourself moving forward - and don't constantly look for reasons to be offended and police well-meaning people's words. We want folks to talk to each other, right? Not just hang out with like-minded people all the time. Everyone is ignorant about something, and everyone is offended by something. If people can't have a calm, respectful dialogue without being hurt by ignorance, or without offending with insensitivity, then what the hell are we supposed to do? Surround ourselves with robots who don't challenge our ideas?" I — Penny Reid

They seemed more like machines than humans, and, let's face it, they are a civilian's army. An army whose soldiers dressed in costumes and walked and talked like robots, with guns strapped to their waist belts, always looking for an enemy. — Kenneth Eade

Through our evolution, we're so specialized for social interaction. So, if you can really design robots that can interact with people, in this very natural, interpersonal way, I think that would be great. You wouldn't have to have people read manuals, in order to operate them. — Cynthia Breazeal

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots. — Jacques Barzun

After a long time, I decided that the Three Laws govern the manner in which my positronic pathways behave. At all times, under all stimuli the Laws constrain the direction and intensity of positronic flow along those pathways so that I always know what to do. Yet the level of knowledge of what to do is not always the same. There are times when my doing-as-I-must is under less constraint than at other times. I have always noticed that the lower the positronomotive potential, then the further removed from certainty is my decision as to which action to take. And the further removed from certainty I am, the nearer I am to ill being. To decide an action in a millisecond rather than a nanosecond produces a sensation I would not wish to be prolonged. What then, I thought to myself, madam, if I were utterly without Laws, as humans are? What if I could make no clear decision on what response to make to some given set of conditions? It would be unbearable and I do not willingly think of it. — Isaac Asimov

We're fascinated with robots because they are reflections of ourselves. — Ken Goldberg

They recognize the Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do. — Isaac Asimov

To my surprise, the sensation of query filled my stomach, spreading through to every corner. This was followed by each point of query ending at the same answer. Device Nineteen had responded to the question by coming to the conclusion that oblivion was the end of every path.
Great. My roommate's an emo.>
My stomach reviewed the comment and rumbled queries to various parts of the diamond, but most were returned unanswered because the required systems were not yet online. — J. Cameron McClain

robots are "only one software upgrade away" from full autonomy, as Scientific American has recently argued. — David A. Mindell

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. — Vijay Kumar

If I could do anything, I'd be an engineer of some sort. I used to build robots. — Genesis Rodriguez

It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees. — Daniel H. Wilson

If you look at it from just a pure economic basis, technology is replacing all of the jobs robots can do, and machinery is replacing the jobs that humans once held. If we don't train our children to imagine, to create, they're going to be unemployable. — Erwin McManus

If I became lost in the multiverse, exploring infinite parallel dimensions, my only criterion for settling down somewhere would be whether or not I could find you: and once I did, I'd stay there even if it was a world ruled by giant spider-priests, or one where killer robots won the Civil War, or even a world where sandwiches were never invented, because you'd make it the best of all possible worlds anyway, and plus we could get rich off inventing sandwiches. — Tim Pratt

And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself. — Bill Joy

Why do humans never do as they're told? Someone should replace you all with robots. No, on second though, they shouldn't, bad idea. — Jonathan Morris

So maybe with the research robots that are out there, people will come up with ways to use them to take care of the elderly. And that can help me someday. Because, you know what? I'm heading in that direction. — Rodney Brooks

The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,' he said.
'And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us. — John Green

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. — Frank Zappa

Art shows us that human beings still matter in a world where money talks the loudest, where computers know everything about us, and where robots fabricate our next meal and also our ride there. — John Maeda

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand. — Chloe Thurlow

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators?
They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.
They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines. — Richard Dawkins

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do. — Paul Kingsnorth

Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness ... Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities ... The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away. — Terence McKenna

I think we need to move to the moons of Mars and learn how to control robots that are on the surface. It's not the impatient way of getting there, but Mars has been there a long time. — Buzz Aldrin

People are fascinated by robots because they're machines that can mimic life. — Colin Angle

These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don't imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny. — Mark O'Connell

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. — Patrick Rothfuss

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt — Google

Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. — Stephen Hawking

We humans have a love-hate relationship with our technology. We love each new advance and we hate how fast our world is changing ... The robots really embody that love-hate relationship we have with technology. — Daniel H. Wilson

As we begin to internalize the technological kingdoms we have built,
as we progressively become more superhuman, what will differentiate us from machinery? — Natasha Tsakos

If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that. — Arundhati Roy

Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes. — Yuval Noah Harari

Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Those machines have no place for empathy. There's billions of dollars being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. — David Hanson

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

It turns out umpires and judges are not robots or traffic cameras, inertly monitoring deviations from a fixed zone of the permissible. They are humans. — Eric Liu

We don't only want to make robots in universities; we want to create good humans. We can't shape a world only with the help of robots made out of technical know-how. We can't be useful to humankind if there are no sentiments in life. — Narendra Modi

Robots ... I think that is a hot topic. — Bill Budge

NO HEARTBEAT, NO SERVICE. — Judd Trichter