Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

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.

I'm not a robot.

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.

Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul.

I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.

For me, it was a big challenge in playing an android that was almost human.

I love looking at machines that mimic human behavior.

Most efforts to approximate normal human behavior in software tend to be creepy or annoying.

Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.

Robots will someday, or maybe, wake up. They may be really smart. They may be as creative, smart and capable as human beings, and fully conscious, and self discerning with free will.

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

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!

I love the idea of anthropomorphizing machines. I love the idea of taking technology and giving it a personality.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

Most of the intelligence out there must be artificial intelligence. We keep looking for critters like us living on a planet like ours, where in fact the majority of the intelligence out there is not biological. That would be my argument.

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

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.

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

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.

When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.

I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.

I worked with Stanley Kubrick for almost a year back in 1990, trying to develop the screen story for his project 'Artificial Intelligence,' which is about a robot boy who wishes to become a real boy, a future scientific fairy tale inspired in the myth of Pinocchio.

A man-like object

Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.