Norbert Wiener Quotes

The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing.

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

Looking ahead, future generations may learn their social skills from robots in the first place. The cute yellow Keepon robot from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the ability to facilitate social interactions with autistic children. Morphy at the University of Washington happily teaches gestures to children by demonstration.

It won’t be long before we all number synthetic creatures among our friends.

Today's robots are very primitive, capable of understanding only a few simple instructions such as 'go left', 'go right', and 'build car'.

Our culture already has a number of well known stories about artificial life and non-human intelligence. In 'Exegesis,' I've tried to not only tell a new and engaging story but also to comment on those well known stories through the details of my novel.

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

If you look at the field of robotics today, you can say robots have been in the deepest oceans, they've been to Mars, you know? They've been all these places, but they're just now starting to come into your living room. Your living room is the final frontier for robots.

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.

So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly; like have a car that flies; like have furniture that is alive.

Robots do not hold on to life. They can't. They have nothing to hold on with - no soul, no instinct. Grass has more will to live than they do.

When we built Roomba, we explicitly designed it to not have a face. We didn't want to think it was cute; we wanted people to take it seriously, so we gave it more of an industrial look. People personified their Roomba anyway. Over 80 percent of people name their robot. We did nothing to encourage people to do that, but they do it anyway.

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.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.

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

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

The name iRobot comes from 'Internet-connected robot.'

Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design - Gecko's homecare robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie's 'android' C-3PO.

I do think, in time, people will have, sort of, relationships with certain kinds of robots - not every robot, but certain kinds of robots - where they might feel that it is a sort of friendship, but it's going to be of a robot-human kind.

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.

We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it.

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.

I can't imagine that life can be replaced with a computer universe. I can't accept it.