Roger Zelazny Quotes

Robots have gotten steadily more capable, but humans' expectations that robots should have minds keeps biting robot developers.

There are an endless number of things to discover about robotics. A lot of it is just too fantastic for people to believe.

Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.

I had the honor of speaking with Asimov. The album ended up being something not directly related to Asimov, but related instead to the concept of the power of robotics.

If you make your robot look exactly like Albert Einstein, then the robot better be as smart as Einstein, or its user is going to feel cheated.

We're going to have robots in the home, but they're not going to be walking. Legs are complicated, unreliable and costly. Robots are going to look and be designed to meet the function they're supposed to perform. People will still name them and connect with them.

I think I'd take a human butler over a robot one.

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.

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

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.

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.

And Roger was crazy with his robots and everything.

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.

In a few years the androids will be working for us. Let’s hope that we never have to work for them

When you program a robot to be intelligent, you learn a number of things. You become very humble and develop enormous respect for natural intelligence because, even if you work day and night for several years, your robot isn't that smart after all.

Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.

Robots have solved and will continue to solve so many human problems. Except for all the ones that they cause.

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.

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

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

The idea that a robot will become more aware of its environment, that telling it to 'go to the kitchen' means something - navigation and understanding of the environment is a robot problem. Those are the technological frontiers of the robotics industry.

The reason it has taken so long for the robotics industry to move forward is because people keep trying to make something that is cool but difficult to achieve rather than trying to find solutions to actual human problems. Technology can be extremely expensive if you don't focus.

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!

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.