Robot Vacuum Quotes

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.

If I were a robot, and I got cheated on with a vacuum cleaner, I’d question my cleanliness. I’d also wonder if dating a beautiful yellow bulldozer was wise. Is my bulldozer nothing but a gold digger?

Precisely. It ignores the greater meaning born out of the combination of those things.” Mosscap touched their metal torso, smiling with pride. “I am made of metal and numbers; you are made of water and genes. But we are each something more than that. And we can’t define what that something more is simply by our raw components. You don’t perceive the way an ant does any more than I perceive like a … I don’t know. A vacuum cleaner. Do you still have vacuum cleaners?

In no sense are the robot dogs, automated vacuum cleaners and old-folks lifting machines just examples of yet another consumer society with nothing meaningful left to spend its disposable income on. No, robots are the future. They have been for generations.

The head of the initiative was the former CEO of a website that served as a repository of humorous images and videos optimized for social media virality—mostly cats doing improbable things, like riding robotic vacuum cleaners and getting stuck in hamburger buns. The website had raised nearly forty-two million dollars in venture capital. He would be working alongside another entrepreneur, a woman who had founded an on-demand housekeeping platform that had shut down amid a spate of lawsuits. The audacity was breathtaking.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

İt is not true that the more you read, the more intelligent you become. Without thinking you cannot be intelligent. You need to think in order to avoid ready-form answers, which can satisfy the inquisitive mind, but cannot give a clear insight into anything, making the brain only some kind of container of various information similar to the microchip of robot or computer. You would become a social robot whose brain contains various information but cannot think. That is why most men know a lot, but learn nothing from that knowledge. Most men know a lot, but can understand nothing on the base of that knowledge. However, it is not also true that the more you think, the more intelligent you become. Without reading you cannot be intelligent. You need to read, especially scientific literature, in order to model any problem which fascinates your mind in a proper and clear way. There cannot be vacuum in the human mind, if there is no scientific rationality there, then mystical irrationality would cover the whole space in your mind. There is no need to emphasize that being under the strong influence of mystical irrationality would confuse your mind more and more. But if scientific rationality appears, mystical irrationality disappears immediately.

The market for vacuum cleaners alone is huge: Transparency Market Research estimated it at $11 billion in 2012 and projected an increase to $14.6 billion by 2018, with robotic vacuum sales rising faster than others.

I’d rather make love to a robot than a politician, because it’d be more personable. Anyway, talking vacuum cleaners with flesh and suits freak me out.

Back in the beginning of the last chapter, I was wondering whether you needed a human observer to collapse the wave function, or if a robot would suffice. Now I was convinced that consciousness had nothing to do with it, since even a single particle could do the trick: a single photon bouncing off of an object had the same effect as if a person observed it. I realized that quantum observation isn't about consciousness, but simply about the transfer of information. Finally I understood why we never see macroscopic objects in two places at once even if they're in two places at once: it's not because they're big, but because they're hard to isolate! A bowling ball outdoors typically gets struck by about 10^20 photons and 10^27 air molecules every second. It's by definition impossible for me to see something without it getting struck by photons, since I can only see it when photons (light) bounce off it, so a bowling ball that's in two places at once will have its quantum superposition ruined even before I have a chance to become consciously aware of it. In contrast, if you pump out as many air molecules as you can with a good vacuum pump, an electron can typically survive for about a second without colliding with anything, which is plenty enough time for it to demonstrate funky quantum-superposition behavior. For example, it takes only a quadrillionth as long (about 10^-15 seconds) for an electron to orbit an atom, so there will be almost no effect on its ability to be on all sides of the atom at once.

begin with a quotation from 1950. The world was a much simpler place back then. Television was in black and white. Jet planes were still to enter passenger service. The silicon transistor was yet to be invented. And there were fewer than a dozen computers in existence worldwide.1 Each was a glorious combination of vacuum tubes, relays, plug boards and capacitors that filled a room.

Coffee?’ he called from downstairs. I went and looked down from the low wall overlooking the kitchen. ‘Yes, please.’ ‘Real coffee, or instant?’ ‘Instant’s good,’ I said, and went downstairs to see him reach down two mugs from a shelf in his beige and steel kitchen. ‘Milk?’ he asked, spooning instant coffee from a metal canister. ‘Yes, please.’ He added milk, filled both mugs from a tap in the corner of the sink and passed one over. I looked at it doubtfully – I hadn’t expected to have to request specifically that my coffee be made with hot water – and saw a reassuring wisp of steam. ‘Do you have boiling water on tap?’ I asked. ‘Yep. Cool, eh?’ ‘Extremely cool,’ I said. ‘And the fridge makes its own ice.’ ‘Far out, brussel sprout.’ ‘I know. It’s pretty incredible,’ he said. ‘Do you have a robot to do your vacuuming, like on The Jetsons?’ ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Sorry.’ ‘Oh well, never mind. The tap’s still impressive.’ ‘Thanks.’ He leant over and kissed me. ‘Good morning.’ ‘Good morning.’ 'What do you want to do today?’ ‘Whatever you like,’ I said dreamily. ‘I don’t mind.’ ‘You’re really not the high-maintenance type, are you?’ ‘I’m just lulling you into a false sense of security,’ I explained. ‘Then I’ll start demanding fur coats and Porsches.’ ‘I see,’ said Mark.

Then there’s iRobot’s Roomba automated vacuum. It has been around for a while and became a punchline in YouTube videos featuring cats, dogs, kids, and turtles chasing, riding, or otherwise abusing the thing. But it is also a perfect example of a product that works well and satisfies a basic need — keeping your house clean 24 hours a day so you do not have to worry about messes. Customers love the Roomba. When you go to its Amazon product page, one of the first reviews is headlined, “I am in love!” That is the kind of enthusiasm and unbridled passion any company should be looking to engender.

but most of them had never worked with captive populations before. They didn’t know how to cuff someone at the wrist and elbow so that the perp couldn’t get his hands out in front to strangle them. They didn’t know how to restrain someone with a length of cord around the neck so that the prisoner couldn’t choke himself to death, by accident or intentionally. Half of them didn’t even know how to pat someone down. Miller knew all of it like a game he’d played since childhood. In five hours, he found twenty hidden blades on the science crew alone. He hardly had to think about it. A second wave of transport ships arrived: personnel haulers that looked ready to spill their air out into the vacuum if you spat on them, salvage trawlers already dismantling the shielding and superstructure of the station, supply ships boxing and packing the precious equipment and looting the pharmacies and food banks. By the time news of the assault reached Earth, the station would be stripped to a skeleton and its people hidden away in unlicensed prison cells throughout the Belt. Protogen would know sooner, of course. They had outposts much closer than the inner planets. There was a calculus of response time and possible gain. The mathematics of piracy and war. Miller knew it, but he didn’t let it worry him. Those were decisions for Fred and his attachés to make. Miller had taken more than enough initiative for one day. Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of. Now, as he escorted a dozen captives in Protogen uniforms to a docked transport heading God-knew-where, the word was taking on new meaning. Are you even human anymore? All posthuman meant, literally speaking, was what you were when you weren’t

Robotic vacuums can clean better than conventional vacuums.

NASA's working assumption until then had been that, hardcore space groupies apart, people would only feel an imaginative investment in space if astronauts were involved, acting as a kind of representative human presence and giving the onlookers somewhere to situate themselves in relation to what they were seeing. Astronauts warmed space up, in media terms. They made it consequential. They provided the marker of human intent without which (it was assumed) any location would be just a set of affectless co-ordinates out there in the vacuum. The unmanned science missions to the planets were for scientists only, not for the general public whose emotions swayed space budgets. But when Pathfinder bounced safely to rest in Ares Vallis, and the six-wheeled rover Sojourner trundled out onto the boulder-studded plain like a big, cute, self-propelling roller skay, NASA discovered it had a spontaneous hit on its hands. It turned out people were willing for a robot to act as their surrogate on another world, so long as they could feel intimately connected to what it was doing.