Robot Dreams Quotes

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer--by demonstration--would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done. And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light--

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

Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.

The robots, on the other hand, acted like a bunch of youthful dreams and got thoroughly crushed.

I am a creature of dreams as well as of reason.

Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?” Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation. “I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil.” “True,” he said. “That’s what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.” Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged mine, after all. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon,” I said. “The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,” he said. “And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.” “They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s errand.

Often, one compensates by playing an instrument, or going hiking, or joining some club. In other words, one creates a new type of society, when not working, in which one can feel more at home.

I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.

Groups, like individuals, will rise to strange heights in answer to a challenge, and vegetate in the absence of a challenge.

It had happened with the sudden catastrophe of a dream – and with all the unreal horror of a dream.

If I die,' she murmured, 'maybe I'll be born again when the Rosen Association stamps out its next unit of my subtype.

I am not a part of this home any longer. I am a tiny thing created by indifferent scientists. I am an experiment, a mechanical bee placed near the hive. The real bees were happy being bees until I came along and gave them all the false information that destroyed their little lives.

Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots? Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations?

We’re human beings, we’re not automatons. You work at your job but you don’t stop being a human being. Being a human being means benefiting from rich cultural traditions—not just our own traditions, but many others—and becoming not just skilled, but also wise. Somebody who can think—think creatively, think independently, explore, inquire—and contribute to society. If you don’t have that, you might as well be replaced by a robot. I think that simply can’t be ignored if we want to have a society that’s worth living in.

Not long ago-incredible though it may seem-I heard a clerk of Oxford declare that he 'welcomed' the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive traffic, because it brought his university into 'contact with real life.' He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression 'real life' in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more 'alive' than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more 'real' than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!

In Phoenix, they were called illegal aliens and pegged as criminals. They were alternately viewed as American, Mexican, or neither. Now, for a moment, they were simply teenagers at a robotics competition by the ocean.

Balcy had left the City and could not re-enter. The City was no longer his; the Caves of Steel were alien. This had to be; and it would be so for others and Earth would be bom again and reach outwards. His heart beat madly and the noise of life about him sank to an unheard murmur. He remembered his dream on Solaria and he understood it at last. He lifted his head and he could see through all the steel and concrete and humanity above him. He could see the beacon set in space to lure men outwards. He could see it shining down — the naked sun.

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.

Are there Laws of Humanics as there are Laws of Robotics? How many Laws of Humanics might there be and how can they be expressed mathematically? I don’t know. “Perhaps, though, there may come a day when someone will work out the Laws of Humanics and then be able to predict the broad strokes of the future, and know what might be in store for humanity, instead of merely guessing as I do, and know what to do to make things better, instead of merely speculating. I dream sometimes of founding a mathematical science which I think of as ‘psychohistory,’ but I know I can’t and I fear no one ever will.

You are as you are until you're not. You change when you want to change. You put your ideas into action in the timing that is best. That's just how it happens. And what I think we all need more than anything is this: permission to be wherever the fuck we are when we're there. You're not a robot. You can't just conjure up motivation when you don't have it. Sometimes you're going through something. Sometimes life has happened. Life! Remember life? Yeah, it teaches you things and sometimes makes you go the long way around for your biggest lessons. You don't get to control everything. You can wake up at 5 a.m. every day until you're tired and broken, but if the words or the painting or the ideas don't want to come to fruition, they won't. You can show up every day to your best intentions, but if it's not the time, it's just not the fucking time. You need to give yourself permission to be a human being.

People in that robotic, drone-like state, walking the earth with no set mission other than to survive another day. Missing the glory of the day, missing the potential for beauty and magic that each moment brings. Missing the gift of life, to walk in the footsteps of the mundane.

And you know what happened next in my dream? Dick Cheney and I said the same thing at the same time: "Well, we had a Cold War to win." And then I screamed at him: "I KNEW you would say that! You ALWAYS say that!" But then, since Cheney and I made the same remark at the same time, I realized he owed me a Coke. So I said, "Jinx! You owe me a Coke!" And Vice-President Dick Cheney smiled sheepishly. *Shudder*... I don't even DRINK coke. I tastes like robot sweat.

Arturo Vega: I always thought the ONLY way to really conquer evil is to make love to it. My favourite dream is always the one where I face the devil. I'm in the nude and the devil appears, and he is a beautiful blue. He looks like a mannequin, he looks like a robot. He doesn't have any clothes on, of course, and he's blue and shiny. I keep hearing voices that say, "It's him! It's him!" And I go, "Okay." So he comes and faces me and I look at him and he's a little taller than me, not much taller, but a little taller, and I say, "I like you." And he says, "I like you too." But he starts beating me up, RA RA RA RA, and I'm down on the floor - and then all of the sudden, he turns into a little baby, like a baby, just a few months old, and then I fuck him, ha ha ha ha. And while I'm fucking him, he's moving his hands, he's moving them like a helpless baby. So I always thought that to conquer evil, you have to make love to it. You have to understand it.

Rachael said, “Do you know what the lifespan of a humanoid robot such as myself is? I’ve been in existence two years. How long do you calculate I have?” After a hesitation he said, “About two more years.” “They never could solve that problem. I mean cell replacement. Perpetual or anyhow semi-perpetual renewal. Well, so it goes.

Don’t you think my interest can be real, even granted that it is professional, too?” “No, I don’t.

The era of artificial intelligence has arrived. You, who only felt far from artificial intelligence, and the growing dream trees, are now inseparable from artificial intelligence.

Jamás había pensado en la semejanza entre los animales eléctricos y los andrillos. Un animal eléctrico era una forma inferior, un robot de menor calidad.

This woman controls my heartbeats. Every love lyric I sing each night is made for her. Every melody chases her heartbeat, and every chorus begs for her love. It has been brought to my attention that a few people on my management team have chosen to approach the love of my life and tell her that she wasn't good for my image. Due to her looks and the past she had no say in creating, they said she wasn't good enough. It's true, we grew up in the same town, but that didn't mean our home lives were built on the same steady foundation. I was blessed enough to never know struggle. This girl had to fight tooth and nail for everything she was given. She sacrificed her own youth, because she didn't want her little sister to go into the foster system. She gave up love, in order for me to go chase my dreams. She gives and gives in order to make others happy, because that's the person she is. She's the most beautiful human being alive, and for anyone--especially people who are supposed to be in my corner--to say differently disgusts me to my core. I am not a robot. I hurt, I ache, I love, and I cry. And it breaks me to live in a world where I have to be afraid of showing who I really am in order to gain followers. So if you don't like this fact--that I am not single and that I am hopelessly in love--then that's fine. If I lose fans over this, I'm okay with that. I will make every sacrifice in the world from this point on in order to give my love fully to the woman who has given more than she ever should've had to give. I love you, Haze. From the new moon to the fullest. From now until forever.

What kind of a ridiculous animal are we to be lords of the world after the dinosaurs had failed? Sure, we’re intelligent, but what’s intelligence? We think it is important because we have it. If the Tyrannosaurus could have picked out the one quality that he thought would ensure species domination, it would be size and strength. And he would make a better case for it. He lasted longer than we’re likely to.

He had wondered, as had most people at one time or another, precisely why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve. Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed. Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator.

If his capacity for dreaming, imagining, inventing, and experimenting is killed in the process, man will become a well-fed robot and die of spiritual malnutrition. The dream has its function and man cannot live without it.

Up there in my little room I was reading revolutionary works and had the feeling that the whole world might explode at any moment; then when I went out, I found life going on as usual, peacefully and calmly: office workers were going off to their jobs, tradesmen were selling their wares in their shops, and one could even see people lazing on benches in the squares, just sitting there watching the hours go by: all of them equally dull and monotonous. Once again, and this would not be the last time, I felt more or less as though I were a stranger in the world, as though I had awakened in it all of a sudden and had no notion of its laws and meaning. I wandered aimlessly about the streets of Buenos Aires, I watched its people, I sat down on a bench in the Plaza Constitucion and meditated. Then I would return to my little room, feeling lonelier than ever. And it was only when I buried myself in books that I seemed to be in touch with reality again, as though that existence out in the streets were, by contrast, a sort of vast dream unfolding in the minds of hypnotized people. It took me many years to realize that in those streets, those public sqaures, and even in those business establishments and offices of Buenos Aires there were thousands who thought or felt more or less as I did at that moment: lonely anguished people, people pondering the sense and nonsense of life, people who had the feeling that they were seeing a world that had gone to sleep round about them, a world made up of men and women who had been hypnotized or turned into robots.

The earth was made for Man and Man was made to conquer and rule it” was not doubted by the builders of the ziggurats of Ur or the pyramids of Egypt. It wasn’t doubted by the hundreds of thousands who labored to wall of China from the rest of the world…scribes of the Hittites, Darius of Persia, Alexander the Great…Confucious or Aristotle. It wasn’t doubted by the architects of the United Nations. It wasn’t doubted by the hundreds of millions who in the postwar years dreamed of a coming utopia where people would rest and all labor would be performed by robots… But that manifesto is doubted now, almost everywhere in our culture, in all walks of life, among the young and old, for whom the dream of a glittering future in which life will become even sweeter and sweeter has been exploded and is meaningless. Your children know better. Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it.

The TV set shouted, “—duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot—designed specifically for YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE—given to you on your arrival absolutely free, equipped fully, as specified by you before your departure from Earth; this loyal, trouble-free companion in the greatest, boldest adventure contrived by man in modern history will provide—” It continued on and on.

You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?

Yet, if there is the possibility of this satisfaction from accurate prophecy in science fiction, there is also the reverse. Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does. After all, if we may prove accurate in our predictions, we may prove inaccurate as well, sometimes ludicrously so.

So far, we have no good answer to this problem. Already thousands of years ago philosophers realised that there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone other than oneself has a mind. Indeed, even in the case of other humans, we just assume they have consciousness – we cannot know that for certain. Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots? Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations? According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the ‘real’ world. Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future, we shall actually do such things. Well, maybe it has already been done – to you? For all you know, the year might be 2216 and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a ‘virtual world’ game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.

This problem,” Rick said, “stems entirely from your method of operation, Mr. Rosen. Nobody forced your organization to evolve the production of humanoid robots to a point where—” “We produced what the colonists wanted,” Eldon Rosen said. “We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn’t made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. We knew the risk we were taking when we developed the Nexus-6 brain unit. But your Voigt-Kampff test was a failure before we released that type of android. If you had failed to classify a Nexus-6 android as an android, if you had checked it out as human—but that’s not what happened.” His voice had become hard and bitingly penetrating. “Your police department—others as well—may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability, such as my innocent niece here. Your position, Mr. Deckard, is extremely bad morally. Ours isn’t.

A hobby. Not a business. Not a way of life. Not necessity. A hobby... An artificial thing. A thing that had no beginning and no end. A thing a man could drop at any minute and no one would ever notice. Like looking up recipes for different kinds of drinks. Like painting pictures no one wanted. Like going around with a crew of crazy robots begging people to let you redecorate their homes. Like writing history no one cares about. Like playing Indian or caveman or pioneer with bow and arrows. Like thinking up centuries-long dreams for men and women who are tired of life and yearn for fantasy.

What worried Dave,” Bryant continued, “is this appearance of the new Nexus-6 advanced type. The Rosen organization assured us, as you know, that a Nexus-6 could be delineated by standard profile tests. We took their word for it. Now we’re forced, as we knew we would be, to determine it on our own. That’s what you’ll be doing in Seattle. You understand, don’t you, that this could go wrong either way. If you can’t pick out all the humanoid robots, then we have no reliable analytical tool and we’ll never find the ones who’re already escaping. If your scale factors out a human subject, identifies him as android—

Here With Me" (x Robot Koch) Caught in the riptide I was searching for the truth There was a reason I collided into you Calling your name in the midnight hour Reaching for you from the endless dream So many miles between us now But you are always here with me Nobody knows why Nobody knows how and This feeling begins just like a spark Tossing and turning inside of your heart Exploding in the dark Calling your name in the midnight hour Reaching for you from the endless dream So many miles between us now But you are always here with me Oh inside me I find my way Back to you Back to you Calling your name in the midnight hour Reaching for you from the endless dream So many miles between us now But you are always here with me Two words In your hands In your hearts It's whole universe You are always here with me

The Routine… ...is not a scene from Alfonso Cuarón’s movie nor a part in Roger Waters “The Wall” Orson Welles might have come close with Kafkaesque nightmares But I beg to differ Routine is ungraspable, unexplainable It is more than just a row of robotic, faceless humanoid figures and less Panem-like It is the tick of an imaginary clock the unprecedented passing time The lure behind the lore Gravitational, earthquake-ish and magnanimous I look at the world and there it is going around in constant rhythms But here I am trapped in the tiniest corner of the tightest corners working my brains out, my fingers, my nimble soul Each to his own Each to his back David and Goliath style How do you wait when the wait is the fate of the unsure? How do you pretend to dream? How do you live in the now when the NOW is all there is to live

you can’t fight a tremendous, emotion filled drive with cold mathematics. This man Hilder has invented a name, ‘Wasters.’ Slowly he has built this name up into a gigantic conspiracy; a gang of brutal, profit-seeking wretches raping Earth for their own immediate benefit. “He has accused the government of being riddled with them, the Assembly of being dominated by them, the press of being owned by them. None of this, unfortunately, seems ridiculous to the average man. He knows all too well what selfish men can do to Earth’s resources. He knows what happened to Earth’s oil during the Time of Troubles, for instance, and the way topsoil was ruined. “When a fanner experiences a drought, he doesn’t care that the amount of water lost in space flight isn’t a droplet in a fog as far as Earth’s overall water supply is concerned. Hilder has given him something to blame and that’s the strongest possible consolation for disaster. He isn’t going to give that up for a diet of figures.

Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given everything, ridiculous. When we could both of us be dream-bodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that resembles drudgery will be handed over to robots by the accountants. We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were. It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.

There was nothing pretty or elegant about their robot. Compared to the gleaming machines other teams had constructed, Stinky was a study in simplicity. The PVC, the balloon, the tape measure—in each case they had chosen the most straightforward solution to a problem. It was an approach that grew naturally out of watching family members fix cars, manufacture mattresses, and lay irrigation piping. To a large swath of the population, driveway mechanics, box-frame builders, and gardeners did not represent the cutting edge of engineering know-how. They were low-skilled laborers who didn’t have access to real technology. Stinky represented this low-tech approach to engineering. But that was exactly what had impressed the judges. Lisa Spence, the NASA judge, believed that there was no reason to come up with a complex solution when an elementary one would suffice. She felt that Carl Hayden’s robot was “conceptually similar” to the machines she encountered at NASA. The guys were in shock. They marched back up to the stage and looked out at the audience with dazed smiles. Lorenzo felt a rush of emotion. The judges’ Special Prize wasn’t a consolation award. These people were giving them real recognition.

You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence — that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own ‘brain’ but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don’t need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is that — whatever you think, you cannot contradict what is written there. You can reconcile what is illogical and absurd in religion with logic and common sense, if it is possible, if not, you should confine your thinking to that illogicality and absurdity, which in turn would make you more and more a muddled thinker. For instance, if it is written there that you should cut head or legs of anyone who dare criticize your religion and your prophet, you should unquestionably believe that it is just and right punishment for him. You can reason in favor of softening that cruel image of your religion by saying that that ‘just and right punishment’ is considered within religious community, but not secular society. However, the absurdity of your vision still remains, because as an advocate of your religion you dream of its spread all over the world, where the cruel and insane claims of your religion would be the norm and standard for everyone. If it is written there that you can sexually exploit any slave girl or woman, especially who doesn’t hold your religious faith or she is an atheist, you should support that sexual violence without any question. After all of them, you would like to be named as a thinker. In my mind, you are a thinker, but a thinker who has got a psychological disorder. It is logical to ask whether all those ‘thinkers’ represent a potential danger for the humanity. I think, yes. However, we are lucky that not all believers would like to penetrate into deeper ‘secrets’ of religion. Many of them believe in God, meditate and balance their spiritual state without getting familiar with what is written in holy scriptures or holding very vague ideas concerning their content. Many believers live a secular life by using their own brain for it. One should love anybody only if he thinks that he should love him/her; if he loves him/her because of God, or religious claims, he can easily kill him/her once because of God, or religious claims, too. I think the grave danger is the last motive which religion cause to arise.

Robopaths are afflicting our world in two ways: 1) autistic worshipers of scientism have ruined the academic world and turned it into a dull factory mass-producing narrow-minded, ultra-specialized drones and drudges that can barely communicate, and never understand the big picture, and 2) conservative, tradition-directed right wingers that robotically carry out the commands of the elites, like Abraham carrying out the order of the ultimate psychopathic elitist, Jehovah. In the West, it’s always right wing cops, soldiers and “patriots” that gun people down and mindlessly and slavishly obey orders. They are “Milgram” humans, totally obedient to right wing authority figures. “God” – the cosmic authoritarian Father Archetype – is the supreme right wing wet dream.

Around nine the next morning, the Carl Hayden team rolled Stinky into a UCSB pool reserved for practice. Other teams were scattered around the perimeter and glanced at the newcomers. The robots on display looked like works of art to the Carl Hayden kids. The competitors appeared to have all the things they didn’t: glass syntactic foam, machined metal, elaborate control panels, and cool matching outfits. Cristian was proud of his robot, but he could see that it looked like a Geo Metro compared with the Lexuses and BMWs around the pool.

Excuse me, madam.” He wasn’t used to approaching women by himself, let alone well-dressed white women. He saw apprehension flash across her face. Maybe she thought he was trying to sell magazines or candy bars, but he steeled himself. He explained that he was building a robot for an underwater contest sponsored by NASA, and his robot was leaking. He wanted to soak up the water with tampons but didn’t know which ones to buy. “Could you help me buy the most best tampons?” The woman broke into a big smile and led him to feminine hygiene. She handed him a box of o.b. ultra-absorbency. “These don’t have an applicator, so they’ll be easier to fit inside your robot.” He stared at the ground, mumbled his thanks, and headed quickly for the checkout. “I hope you win,” she called out, laughing.

Fredi realized that something extraordinary was about to occur. He leaned across the table and grabbed Lorenzo’s shirt. “Lorenzo, if what I think is about to happen does happen, I do not, under any circumstances, want to hear you say the word Hooters onstage.

Fredi had always focused on getting kids excited to learn. He cared less about covering the required curriculum and more about finding hands-on projects. To many students, school felt sterile and bureaucratic. Fredi’s music was just one way he tried to change the ambience. It didn’t necessarily matter if they liked it. It was enough to be different. He also fought for unstructured time in the school day. When he arrived at Carl Hayden in 1987, he started a class called Science Seminar. There was no curriculum. Fredi just told students to find something fun to build or an idea to test. Over the years, students had embarked on a variety of unusual projects. One student tried to teach color-blind rats the differences among colors. Another student constructed a 1:60 clay model of downtown Phoenix, placed it in a wind tunnel, and blew carbon dioxide across it. The goal: determine how architecture could be used to increase air circulation and help dissipate trapped air pollution. Fredi’s room became the refuge of tinkerers, inventors, and frustrated dreamers.

The vast majority of the energy-expensive tissue in our skulls is devoted to processing and organizing information. We are also almost certainly unique in terms of the amount of heat-generating work these otherwise immobile organs do, by generating electric pulses when mulling over the often trivial information our senses gather. Thus when we sleep we dream; when we are awake we constantly seek out stimulation and engagement; and when we are deprived of information we suffer.

In the coming years, our relationships with robots will become ever more complex. But already a recurring pattern is emerging. No matter what your current job or your salary, you will progress through a predictable cycle of denial again and again. Here are the Seven Stages of Robot Replacement: 1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do. 2. [Later.] OK, it can do a lot of those tasks, but it can’t do everything I do. 3. [Later.] OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often. 4. [Later.] OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks. 5. [Later.] OK, OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do. 6. [Later.] Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more interesting and pays more! 7. [Later.] I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now. [Repeat.] This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that resembles drudgery will be handed over to robots by the accountants. We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were. It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.

Manusia terbentuk dari impian. Tanpa itu, kita hanyalah robot yang bergerak mengikuti hiruk pikuk dunia, tapi tidak mengiringi irama yang dilantuntan bumi. Dan impian bukan sesuatu yang absolut. Ia dapat berubah, bertambah, bahkan berkurang.

Dreams are to be lived. Dreams are the starting point for goals, plans and focus. Without dreams, we are just robots completing tasks. Empty shells of what could have been human beings.

But I was feeling more urgency to find funding for my undersea robots, and I had a feeling that it was going to take all my sales skills and persistence—and a deeper entrée into the highly classified world of undersea warfare—to persuade Navy officials to help me with my Titanic dream.

The second legend is about paradise. “They pulled it off. They did it. On the servers of one of the big studios in California they used ready-made scans to set up a whole world on the other side of the Uncanny Valley. Or at least a house, a garden, and some bodies. They created a foolproof filter, so that finally you could connect to the net – mind-to-mech and even mind-to-mind – without any risk of malware unstitching your memory or infecting your consciousness. So they log in, and there, on the other side, they have soft, warm, moist bodies again, miraculously fleshy to the touch. They can touch, smell, and taste again.” Dagenskyoll speeds up, and the hulking robots bunched around him in a spellbound circle press even closer, leaning in, sticking out microphone tongues and scanner tendrils. “They can drink and eat and drink.” He raises his glass of vodka and a long metallic grating sound rings out, krrrshaaahhrrr: the screeching interference of speakers and microphones, or maybe even the sighing of embarrassed machinery. “They drink, drink and sleep, even if they can’t dream, and they walk on the grass and bathe in the sunshine—” Krrrshaaahhrrr! “They have dogs, cats, birds, bugs. Mosquitoes bite them, dust and pollen get in their eyes, the sun blinds them, since the sun is always rising there, and they set up grills and burn their fingers—” Krrrshaaahhrrr! “—as they eat the steaming meat.” Now this is too much, and the robots press up against Dagenskyoll, almost crushing him. “Do you know the IP?” “Only the bosses of the alliances know it. They’re the ones who meet there. To discuss strategies for the future, exchange information, and resolve disputes.” A black medico mech roars from a distorted speaker straight into Dagenskyoll’s front display: “BUT WHERE! WHERE IS IT?!

This can’t be all. Once there was the profound mystery and essence of humanity, but he and they – the transformers – lost it all so completely and irrevocably in the IS3 transformation that now they can’t even make the imaginative leap to comprehend what they have lost. Yet they feel and they suspect, digesting hundreds of days in the mechanical repetition of work, as if they were really nothing but that which they are able to do, surrendering to energy cycles more rigidly immutable than the astronomical cycles of darkness and light, vacantly absorbing the after-images of artificial entertainment and winding these fictional lives around their minds. Standing for hours in a statue-like stupor, switched off like real robots, not doing anything, not living anything, no longer even bothering to perform the social rituals of the body or to carry out the pathetic charade of sexbot carnality. Their whole life is a robotic life: fix this, do that, build this. Their whole life is a hardware dream, and yet they feel, they really feel that THIS CANNOT BE ALL.

I’m living an “a-ticket” dream. That’s the ticket you would need back then for something lame, like riding the trolley, walking through the staircases of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, or sitting in the theater to watch an Abraham Lincoln robot put you to sleep. Four snores and seven years ago.