Robots And Empire Quotes

Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

Changelessness is decay." "A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse." "Changelessness is a change for the worse

No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.

An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

It lasted for a long time, I believe." "A very long time. It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end.

Zeroth Law...

The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives—past and present and to come—forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you.

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 decay - as your world has done.

Yet weren't all human beings simply human beings no matter what name you applied to them[?]

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

Surely it is better that the immoral learn morality through adversity than that the moral forget morality in prosperity.

That’s right, but it’s not a mathematical proposition. It’s a sociological observation and there is always the possibility of exceptions to such observations." - Dr. Mandamus to Dr. Kelden Amadiro

Since emotions are few and reasons many, the behavior or a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet.' R. Giskard Reventlov

And then—U. S. Robots has interstellar travel, and humanity has the opportunity for galactic empire.

If you have the courage to ask the question, you should have the courage to ask it openly.

Work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes undying part of a totality. That totality is human life. Past and present and to come forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens and thousands of years. And has been growing more elaborate, and on the whole more beautiful.

I have made a discovery,' said Giskard, his voice carrying no shade of emotion. 'I have made it because, for the first time in my existence, I faced thousands of human beings. Had I done this two centuries ago, I would have made the discovery then. Had I never faced so many at once, then I would never have made the discovery at all. 'Consider, then, how many vital points I might easily grasp, but never have and never will, simply because the proper conditions for it will never come my way. I remain ignorant except where circumstance helps me, and I cannot count on circumstance.

I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms––"the Force and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say. The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face. Darth Vader has not developed his humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? . . . The thing to do is to learn to live in your period of history as a human being ...[b]y holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you. Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity––because that's where the life is, from the heart––or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Knobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions. ... [O]f course the Force moves from within. But the Force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. Star Wars is not a simple morality play. It has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man.

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.

Chapter Five: Elvi A few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbit of a planet called Ilus, hitchhiking on the gunship Rocinante. As the uncanny semisentient intelligence of the protomolecule tried to make contact with other nodes in the gate builders’ long-dead empire, it woke up mechanisms that had been dormant for millions—or even billions—of years. The end result had been an ancient factory returning to life, a massive robot attack, the melting of one artificial moon, and the detonation of a power plant that nearly cracked the planet in two. All in all, a really shitty experience. So when Elvi’s team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains (..) Tiamat's Wrath

They met near the southern limit of the establishment grounds and for a while they spoke in an abbreviated and Aesopic language. They understood each other well, with many decades of communication behind them, and it was not necessary for them to involve themselves in all the elaboration's of human speech. Daneel said in an all but unhearable whisper, "Clouds. Unseen." Had Daneel been speaking for human ears, he would have said, "As you see, friend Giskard, the sky has clouded up. Had Madam Gladia waited her chance to see Solaria, she would not, in any case, have succeeded." And Giskard's reply of "Predicted. Interview, rather," was the equivalent of "So much was predicted in the weather forecast, friend Daneel, and might have been used as an excuse to get Madam Gladia to bed early. It seemed to me to be more important, however, to meet the problem squarely and to persuade her to permit this interview I have already told you about.

I found myself forgetting about Luke, who was standing there emoting all over the place, and watching the robot to see if its performance was going properly!” Kershner says. “That happened time and again, so I would have to pull myself back and concentrate on the actor. Without him, nothing was going to happen. But it’s hard to admit that my directing talent may be judged by the performance of an inanimate object.

But… the captain was the captain. Despite turning his back on the army, Nate still felt loyalty to the iron hero. She’d shown him the evils of the American empire and the need to build a new society, like the one on Mars. And better, she’d led him to victory against overwhelming odds. If Captain Zephyr trusted the robot named Crystal Socrates, then he did as well. *****

The goal of fighting, Wilson told the Senate in January 1917, must be “peace without victory,” because “victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished.” As Wilson saw it, “only a peace between equals can last,” meaning that “the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.” In place of one mighty empire acting as globocop, Wilson proposed a league of nations, “a single and overwhelming powerful group of nations who shall be the trustee of peace in the world.

Some historians propose a very down-to-earth answer to all these questions. Europe’s firearms revolution, they argue, had nothing to do with cultural traditions: Europeans simply got good with guns because they fought a lot. Europe, the theory runs, was divided into lots of little states that were always at each other’s throats. China, by contrast, was a unified empire for most of the time between 1368 and 1911. As a result, the Chinese rarely fought and had little reason to invest in improving guns. For the feuding Europeans, however, investing in better guns was literally a matter of life and death. Therefore it was Europeans, not Chinese, who perfected the gun.

Un robot no puede lastimar a la humanidad o, por falta de acción, permitir que la humanidad sufra daños. La considero ahora la ley Cero de la Robótica. La primera ley debería decir: Un robot no debe dañar a un ser humano, o permitir, por inacción, que el ser humano sufra algún daño, a menos que tal acción viole la ley Cero de la Robótica.

Un robot no puede lastimar a la humanidad o, por falta de acción, permitir que la humanidad sufra daños. La considero ahora la ley Cero de la Robótica. La primera ley debería decir: Un robot no debe dañar a un ser humano, o permitir, por inacción, que el ser humano sufra algún daño, a menos que tal acción viole la ley Cero de la Robótica.

For organizational behavior expert Charles Handy, the S-curve is the essential form of how businesses, social organizations and political systems develop over time, “it is the line of all things human.”7 Tech analyst Paul Saffo advises to “look for the S-curve,” noting that the uptake of new technologies—from personal robots to driverless cars—is destined to follow its shape.8 Scholars have used the sigmoid curve to describe the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire, but also to predict modern-day shifts, such as the decline of the United States as a global superpower.9 In the field of systems thinking, the authors of the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth put the S-curve at the heart of their analysis.10 More recently, economist Kate Raworth has shown that mainstream economics assumes that GDP growth follows an “exponential curve left hanging in mid-air,” when the reality is that it is far more likely to level off into the shape of the S-curve.

You are trying to say that I am a silly robot following a predetermined course into destruction.

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.

O sight most tragic, this - a robot-man, who doth require a mask to stay alive. What situation e'er did lead to this? How can he stand to live beneath a mask? But soft, Piett, reconsider this: Aye, verily, how shall I judge? The mask he wears is far more obvious than most. With Vader it is plain he wears a mask, though few have seen the scarring underneath. But truly, what man doth not wear a mask? For all of us are masked in some way - some choose sharp cruelty as their outward face, some put themselves behind a king's facade, some hide behind the mask of bravery, some put on the disguise of arrogance. But underneath our masks, are we not one? Do not all wish for love, and joy, and peace? And whether rebel or Imperial, do not our hearts all beat in time to make the pounding rhythm of the galaxy? So while Darth Vader's mask keeps him alive, and sits upon his face for all to see, 'tis possible he is more honest than a man who wears no mask, but hides his self. But come, Piett, now still thy prating tongue - his private time is done, his mask back on.

Russians and Ottomans pinched off the western end of the steppes between 1500 and 1650; in central Asia, Mughals and Persians pushed the Uzbeks and Afghans back between 1600 and 1700; and in the east, China swallowed up the endless wastes of Xinjiang between 1650 and 1750. By 1727, when Russian and Chinese officials met at Kiakhta to sign a treaty fixing their borders in Mongolia, the gunpowder empires had effectively shut down the steppe highway.

The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The Creator invited him to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and dance. And the experimental creature wasn't killed after the banquet. He was transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced from the palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation didn’t hurt at all. And then the cells were stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet. They would evolve into ever more complicated life forms as the eons went by. Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will. Trout didn't give the experimental creature a proper name. He simply called him The Man. On the virgin planet, The Man was Adam and the sea was Eve. The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve. Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain. He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water. He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next—and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man yelled this: “Cheese!” Another time he yelled, “Wouldn't you really rather drive a Buick?

When Scripture says that Jesus came at “the fullness of time,” it means it. God designed history—with the rise of this empire and the fall of that one, with this person born here and that person born there, with this event happening now and that one then—to prepare us for Jesus and to give room for faith. God values us too much to treat us like robots, and I’ll add (and maybe I’m bold to do so) that only unimaginative atheists want the Ten Commandments painted on the moon or Jesus captured on videotape.

Crying was something it had only seen humans do in dramas, and in dramas they did it much more prettily, at dramatic moments, with swelling music in the background. Instead, the girl was getting mucus on her sleeve, and Hemiola didn’t understand the context, and it doubted she would appreciate it providing swelling music on her behalf.