Robotics has been around forever, and it's been the next big thing forever, and it is so exciting and compelling that it's easy to get carried away. People almost always do, and that's one of the things that has held back the industry.
'I Am Legend' is quite unusual for its time. I just wanted to write a story about female boxers, and I couldn't get that going in my mind. I don't know exactly where the idea of just a man pitting himself against a robot boxer came from.
[Father Cornelius confides in a bartender] Priest Vito Cornelius: I know she's made to be strong, but she's also so fragile, so human. Know what I mean? [Robot bartender shakes its head]
Cooper: You'd do this for us? TARS: Before you get all teary, try to remember that as a robot, I have to do anything you say. Cooper: Your cue light's broken. TARS: I'm not joking. *Flashes cue light*
Building a robot that has legs and walks around is a very expensive proposition. Mother Nature has created many wonderful things, but one thing we do have that nature doesn't is the wheel, a continuous rotating joint, and tracks, so we need to make u...
Well, really the way worked was that I had probably built fifty robots before Mystery Science Theater, and I had sold them in a store in Minneapolis in a store called Props, which was kind of a high end gift shop.
I got the script for 'Real Steel.' I started reading and saw that it was about robot boxing, and I was immediately turned off. It's not my thing. But I continued on, and by the time I got to the end of the script, I had chicken skin and tears in my e...
Space Princess: The Universe is Changing. The fire of goodness is going out in the Galaxy. Space Ambassador: The Ship is... turning around... Ship's Captain: Fire the thrusters! Esper Robot: [is silent] Communications Officer: He says a gravitational...
What else could have happened? Car wouldn't start? House caught on fire? Escaped convict climbed through his bedroom window and tied him with duct tape? Poison eggnog? Or maybe I just didn't matter to him.
For an instant Stile was daunted by the improbability of it all: a man, a cyborg, a robot, an animalhead, and a wooden golem, all riding unicorns through a battlefield strewn with goblins and dragons, pursuing an invaluable ball of power-rock that ro...
What separates us into engineers and robots, puppeteers and puppets, kings and pawns, is not the status we hold at any given time among others - status is irrelevant; it is the level of ever-present awareness we have of a grey-matter tailor's tools [...
Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.
Ever since the robot was first invented, there have been people who swear up and down that this marks the first step towards the fall of man … To be fair, their arguments are backed with scientific fact taken from documentary films such as The Term...
The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty." Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely.
Over the road there was a church: a modern gray building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their ...
If you don’t know how to love, then any old robot or mechanical device would best suit your relationship style. In this situation, vacuum cleaners might make the best lovers.
Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects. That means if you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can d...
I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and de...
It is possible that librarians will be robots, controlled by Master Minds having mastery of a master computer at the Library of Congress. Or there will be no libraries and librarians, flesh-and-blood or otherwise. The onetime library patron will pres...
Why is it that the older we get the more we lose that sense of wonder? We hold our heads down and, like little robots, march day after day to jobs we hate, work with people we’d rather not, and live uninspired lives. That’s the sin, if you ask me...
The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize - to be awarded for sending a robotic spacecraft to this nearby world that can roa...
