28 Quotes Tagged: Robots

They have all let me do what I delt I needed to do, Anfew thought, even when they privately disagreed with it. THey have granted me my wishes — out of love for me.
Yes, love. For a robot.

Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare 'automeals,' heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be 'ordered' the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.
Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.
[M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.
"[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.
[V]ehicles with 'Robot-brains' … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.
[W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible.
[T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a

The "Society for Humanity" is a Northern organization, primarily, you know, and they make no secret of not wanting the Machines. — Susan, they are few in numbers, but it is an association of powerful men. Heads of factories; directors of industries and agricultural combines who hate to be what they call "the Machine's office-boy" belong to it. Men with ambition belong to it. Men who feel themselves strong enough to decide for themselves what is best for themselves, and not just to be told what is best for others.["](from The Evitable Conflict, 1950)

It symbolizes neither one nor the other, but a mixture of the two without priority

Is everything normal now?
"Well he hasn't got religious mania, and he isn't running around in a circle
spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he's normal." (45)

Are you truly a robot?"

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).

Bogert's face was bloodless, 'He's dead!' 'No!' Susan Calvin burst into body-racking gusts of wild laughter, 'not dead — merely insane. I confronted him with the insoluble dilemma, and he broke down. You can scrap him now — because he'll never speak again.

And Elvex said, "I was the man." - In "Robot dreams" (Short story)

No, he would simply go to town and use the public library. That was the proper self-reliant thing to do — the correct way for a free robot to handle a problem, he told himself.
…
To the library, yes.
And he would dress for the occasion. Yes. Yes. Humans did not enter the public library unclothed. Neither would he.

Yeah! Susie herself. That robot's a mathematical wiz. He knows all about everything plus a bit on the side. He does triple integrals in his head and eats up tensor analysis for dessert.

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.

What a brain is made of isn't the essential thing: it's how the brain functions. Its thought patterns, its reaction time, its ability to reason and generalise from experience. Why does the whole issue have to be drown down to the level of organic cells versus positrons?

I see into minds, you see', the robot continued, 'and you have no idea how complicated they are. I can't begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them — but I try, and your novels help.

Durante el siglo veinte, Susan, comenzamos un nuevo ciclo de guerras..., ¿cómo las llamaremos? ¿Guerras ideológicas? ¿Las emociones de la religión aplicadas a los sistemas económicos, en lugar de los extranaturales? De nuevo las guerras eran "inevitables" y entonces se disponía de armas atómicas, de manera que la humanidad no podía vivir ya por más tiempo en el tormento del inevitable derroche de la inevitabilidad. Y vinieron los robots positrónicos...
Vinieron a tiempo, y con ellos el viaje interplanetario. De manera que ya no pareció tan importante que él mundo fuese Adam Smith o Carlos Marx. Ninguno de los dos tenía ya gran influencia en las nuevas circunstancias. Ambos tenían que adaptarse y terminaron casi en el mismo lugar.