#robots

Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was "Sì, abbiamo un'anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot – "Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots." And I thought, exactly. That’s the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we’re here. No buffalo knows it’s a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we’re members of Homo sapiens, and it’s the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations. It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation. ↗

— Daniel C. Dennett

#matter #mind #robots #soul #truth

He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO. ↗

— Cory Doctorow

#humour #robots #scifi #spellbinding #star-wars

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots. ↗

— Mark Boal

#after #alert #alien #always #around

Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor, What have you done to my boy? He's not flesh and blood, he's aluminum alloy!" The doctor said gently, What I'm going to say will sound pretty wild. But you're not the father of this strange looking child. You see, there still is some question about the child's gender, but we think that its father is a microwave blender. ↗

— Tim Burton

#robots #death

Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.” -R. Daneel Olivaw ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#olivaw #robots #sci-fi #design

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. ↗

— Norbert Wiener

#intelligence #robots #intelligence

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect. ↗

— Arthur C. Clarke

#computers #diversity #robots #intelligence

Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule ↗

— Donald A. Norman

#design

I got to draw monsters, robots and write funny stories. I loved doing that stuff and working with the actors. But it got to be less and less that stuff and more about trying to be everywhere and not being able to do one thing very enjoyably. ↗

— Jhonen Vasquez

#about #being #doing #draw #everywhere

The other one I did was "I, Robot." I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world. ↗

— Cory Doctorow

#asimov #did #i #isaac #other