Barney Oliver Quotes

Robots are great. I am saying that now so that when a future civilization of robots takes us captive, they will search through the 'Guardian' web archive and realise I said, 'Robots are great,' and then they'll choose to save me.

And I think it's likely that there will be Data's out there one day. I hope so, if there are, that they all look exactly like me!

Robots... I think that is a hot topic.

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

I have been motivated by this idea since I was a kid that if we invented machines that were created in the way that people are - were aware, have free will, inventive machines, machines that would be geniuses - potentially, they could reinvent themselves. They're not just applying it to other things - they could actually redesign themselves.

A.I. will make it possible for the Internet to directly engage people in the real world, through robotics and drones and little machines that will do smart things by themselves.

Hollywood likes to imagine robots as mechanical copies of ourselves - which is a terrible idea.

Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.

No one knows when a robot will approach human intelligence, but I suspect it will be late in the 21st century. Will they be dangerous? Possibly. So I suggest we put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.

We're seeing the arrival of conversational robots that can walk in our world. It's a golden age of invention.

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

Being a sci-fi geek myself and going to movies all my life, I came to the conclusion that there were really two camps of how robots have been designed. It's either the tin man, which is a human with metal skin, or it's an R2D2.

Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs - or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and - as evidenced by YouTube videos - entertaining cats.

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

Building robot versions of people is very expensive.

Let's not kid ourselves here, robots already run most of our world. We'll be their butlers soon enough.

As far as what is the line between human and machine? That's a great question.

The question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this lone guy in the backyard, you know - 'I accidentally built a 747.' I don't think that's going to happen.

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.

The most advanced of them seemed hardly like human beings.

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

Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.

It will not be a world of man versus machine. It will be a world of man plus machines.

I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.