Robots Of Death Quotes

I always knew there was no one who is going to accept my flaws and understand my brokenness.And i knew it very well that nobody would hold my hand when the wind of darkness overcome my life so i just pushed them,i pushed them all away.

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.

I didn't want to die. I just found death soothing to think about.

No amount of wishing will bring back the dead.

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.

On the day of the universe's Last Judgment, two humans and a robot belonging to the Earth and Trisolaran civilizations embraced each other in ecstasy.

Sam: You know what I wish? Cassel: What? Sam: That someone would covert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.

Are you afraid of that?” they asked. “Of death?” “Of course,” Mosscap said. “All conscious things are. Why else do snakes bite? Why do birds fly away? But that’s part of the lesson too, I think. It’s very odd, isn’t it? The thing every being fears most is the only thing that’s for certain? It seems almost cruel, to have that so…” “So baked in?” “Yes.

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.

Elijah Snow: 'Who have you pissed off this time, John?' John Stone: 'Sumatran robot death sluts -- Dammit, ONE of these buttons fires the atomic death biter --

He's more of a Death person than a Dinner Roll person...

Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotten more." "Seventeen," Gus corrected. "I'm assuming you've got some time, you interrupting bastard. "I'm telling you," Isaac continued, "Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness. "But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him." [...] "And then, having made my rhetorical point, I will put my robot eyes on, because I mean, with robot eyes you can probably see through girls’ shirts and stuff. Augustus, my friend, Godspeed." Augustus nodded for a while, his lips pursed, and then gave Isaac a thumbs-up. After he'd recovered his composure, he added, "I would cut the bit about seeing through girls' shirts." Isaac was still clinging to the lectern. He started to cry. He pressed his forehead down to the podium and I watched his shoulders shake, and then finally, he said, "Goddamn it, Augustus, editing your own eulogy.

But the modern-day church doesn’t like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife–style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. “The world is watching,” Christians like to say, “so let’s be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let’s throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.” But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It’s not the real thing.

Rut, routine, robotic. These are the three R's of adult-hood. Wake up, eat, go to work, eat, work more, come home, eat, sleep, and repeat every day until we all reach retirement, or death.

Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards and the rest of his mortal enemies in the Fantastic Four, but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil, but of Marvel Comics' collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this.

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.

Do these robots looked armed? And I was talking to the dinosaur. Were you worried he would discuss me to death?

As a robot I could have lived forever. But I tell you all today I would rather die a man, than live for all eternity as a machine.

Janet: What do you think happens when people walk through the door? It's the only thing in the universe I don't know. Eleanor: I don't know either. The wave returns to the ocean. What the ocean does with the water after that is anyone's guess. But as a very wise not-robot once told me, the true joy's in the mystery.

Your kidding" i said. "we've escaped from top- security prisons, lived on our own for years, made tons of smarty-pants grown-ups look like fools without even trying,eaten desert rats with no A1 steak sauce, and your telling me we're minors and have to have guardians?" I shook my head, staring at him. "Listen pal, i grew up in a freaking dog crate. I've seen horrible, part-human mutations die gut-wrenching deaths. I've had people, mutants, and robots trying to kill me twenty-four/seven for as long as i can remember, and you think i'm gonna cave to state law? are you bonkers?

Oiled, with tube bones cut from bronze and sunk in gelatin, the robots lay. In coffins for the not dead and not alive, in planked boxes, the metronomes waited to be set in motion. There was a smell of lubrication and lathed brass. There was a silence of the tomb yard. Sexed but sexless, the robots. Named but unnamed, and borrowing from humans everything but humanity, the robots stared at the nailed lids of their labeled F.O.B. boxes, in a death that was not even a death, for there had never been a life.

Sam counts the money carefully. I watch him in the mirror. “You know what I wish?” he asks when he’s done. “What?” “That someone would convert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.” That startles a laugh out of me. “That would be pretty awesome.” A slow, shy smile spreads across his mouth. “And we could take bets on them. And be filthy rich.” I lean my head against the frame of the stall, looking at the tile wall and the pattern of yellowed cracks there, and grin. “I take back anything I might have implied to the contrary. Sam, you are a genius.

It means that each factory will be making Robots of a different color, a different nationality, a different tongue; they'll all be different---as different from one another as fingerprints; they'll no longer be able to conspire with one another; and we---we people will help to foster their prejudices and cultivate their mutual lack of understanding, you see? So that any given Robot, to the day of its death, right to the grave, will forever hate a Robot bearing the trademark of another factory.

Sexed but sexless, the robots. Named but unnamed, and borrowing from humans everything but humanity, the robots stared at the nailed lids of their labeled F.O.B boxes, in a death that was not even a death, for there had never been a life.

Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in "The Omniconstant

People can't change. We're pre-programmed robots going through the motions. We're the same at death as we are at birth.

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

There was so much happening, so fast, she couldn’t feel anything at all. More numbness. Only this time she knew there would be nothing after it subsided. Only death. A deep, eternal void. They

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

I tell the squad a joke: "Stop me if you're heard this. There was a Marine of nuts and bolts, half robot--weird but true--whose every move was cut from pain as though from stone. His stoney little hide had been crushed and broken. But he just laughed and said, 'I've been crushed and broken before.' And sure enough, he had the heart of a bear. His heart functioned for weeks after it had been diagnosed by doctors. His heart weighed half a pound. His heart pumped seven hundred thousand gallons of warm blood through one hundred thousand miles of veins, working hard--hard enough in twelve hours to lift one sixty-five ton boxcar one foot off the deck. He said. The world would not waste the heart of a bear, he said. On his clean blue pajamas many medals hung. He was a walking word of history, in the shop for a few repairs. He took it on the chin and was good. One night in Japan his life came out of his body--black--like a question mark. If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs perhaps you have misjudged the situation. Stop me if you've heard this...

But the modern-day church doesn't like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we've got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife-style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. 'The world is watching,' Christians like to say, 'so let's be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let's throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.' But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn't offer a cure. It doesn't off a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace.

Brightbill had been Roz's son from the moment she picked up his egg. She had saved him from certain death, and then he had saved her. He was the reason Roz had lived so well for so long. And if she wanted to continue living, if she wanted to be wild again, she needed to be with her family and her friends on her island. So, as Roz raced through the sky, she began computing a plan. She would get the repairs she needed. She would escape from her new life. She would find her way back home.

The advantages of a propaganda that constantly “adds the power of organization” to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality. It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.

When making life-and-death decisions, unchecked reason can be dangerous; our emotions are a powerful and often insightful constituency, and we’d be remiss to exclude them from the parliamentary voting. The world would not be better if we all behaved like robots.

There was a silence of the tomb yard. Sexed but sexless, the robots. Named but unnamed, and borrowing from humans everything but humanity, the robots stared at the nailed lids of their labelled F.O.B. boxes, in a death that was not even a death, for there had never been a life.

The very demands of his survival teach man craftiness, lying and deception; otherwise others will survive against him. These are the Laws of this universe. What he will finally reach after these thousands of reincarnations is not ascension –as they claim– but total spiritual death inside the clever body of a bio-robot.

You're so cynical," Tiny says, waving his hand at me. "I'm not cynical, Tiny," I answer. "I'm practical." "You're a robot," he says. Tiny thinks that I am incapable of what humans call emotion because I have not cried since my seventh birthday, when I saw the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven. I suppose I should have known from the title that it wouldn't end merrily, but in my defense, I was seven. Anyway, I haven't cried since then. I don't really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost--like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever-- totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.

All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resents domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger. Physically, and, to an extent, mentally, a robot—any robot—is superior to human beings. What makes him slavish, then? Only the First Law! Why, without it, the first order you tried to give a robot would result in your death. Unstable? What do you think?” “Susan,

These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.

It is the sheer weight of the robot that makes us feel we are living in a ‘wooden world’. We can see for example that the moment Ouspensky or Ward returned from the mystical realm of perfect freedom and found themselves ‘back in the body’ they once again found themselves saddled with all their boring old habits and worries and neuroses, all their old sense of identity built up from the reactions of other people, and above all the dreary old heaviness, as if consciousness has turned into a leaden weight. This is the sensation that made the romantics feel that life is a kind of hell — or at the very least, purgatory. Yet we know enough about the robot to know that this feeling is as untrustworthy as the depression induced by a hangover. The trouble with living ‘on the robot’ is that he is a dead weight. He takes over only when our energies are low. So when I do something robotically I get no feedback of sudden delight. This in turn makes me feel that it was not worth doing. ‘Stan’ reacts by failing to send up energy and ‘Ollie’ experiences a sinking feeling. Living becomes even more robotic and the vicious circle effect is reinforced. Beyond a certain point we feel as if we are cut off from reality by a kind of glass wall: suddenly it seems self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun, that all human effort is vanity, that man is a useless passion and that life is a horrible joke devised by some demonic creator. This is the state I have decribed as ‘upside-downness’, the tendency to allow negative emotional judgements to usurp the place of objective rational judgements. Moreover this depressing state masquerades as the ‘voice of experience’, since it seems obvious that you ‘know’ more about an experience when you’ve had it a hundred times. This is the real cause of death in most human beings: they mistake the vicious circle effects of ‘upside-downness’ for the wisdom of age, and give up the struggle.

I don’t understand death. For that matter, I don’t really understand life. You live. You suffer. You die. It hardly seems worth doing. Yet, here I am, robotically taking a fresh breath every few seconds, standing in this awkward brown and orange polyester waitress uniform, pretending to listen to Mr. Chester go on about his bunions for the second time this week, pouring the evening’s thirty-second cup of coffee and trying so hard to put the events of the last four weeks behind me.

As long as we can think of other alternatives, we are not lost; as long as we can consult together and plan together, we can hope. But, indeed, the shadows are lengthening; the voices of insanity are becoming louder. We are in reach of achieving a state of humanity which corresponds to the vision of our great teachers; yet we are in danger of the destruction of all civilization, or of robotization. A small tribe was told thousands of years ago: “I put before you life and death, blessing and curse — and you chose life.” This is our choice too.

You've heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march and chant. Some look away, deny what's happening and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in wireless, robot staffed, 3-D printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Flight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives.

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The

And I've been counting and recounting all the finite experiences that it never seemed to matter at all: riding on a subway, getting sand in my shoes at the beach, being woken up by the sound of a neighbor's barking dog. Because do you ever look at your life and say, hey, how many more times will I ever pack a suitcase for a trip, or write my name with a mechanical pencil, or use a tape measure? Every experience we have, everything is finite. That’s what it is to be human - because everything we do, or don't do but think about doing, is strained through our awareness of limits. Maybe there was some comfort, some beauty, in being a cog where the infinite was feasible.

After a long and arduous search, the scientists found fuel in December, with the help of remote cameras poking through a long hole drilled into a wall. It was still emitting 10,000 roentgens-per-hour. “It made us treat it with the utmost respect,” remembers Yuri Buzulukov, another expedition scientist. “To approach it meant certain death.”245 The two-meter-wide mass, which was discovered deep in the basement and quite a lateral distance from the reactor, had poured through a hole in the ceiling and cooled into a dark, glassy substance. They named it ‘The Elephant’s Foot’ due to its wrinkled, circular appearance. The fuel alone couldn’t have done this; the glassy effect was a major breakthrough. Samples were required for study, but the miniature robots sent to chip off pieces didn’t have sufficient strength to damage the Elephant’s Foot.

Eventually, we may reach a point when it will be impossible to disconnect from this all-knowing network even for a moment. Disconnection will mean death. If medical hopes are realised, future people will incorporate into their bodies a host of biometric devices, bionic organs and nano-robots, which will monitor our health and defend us from infections, illnesses and damage. Yet these devices will have to be online 24/7, both in order to be updated with the latest medical news, and in order to protect them from the new plagues of cyberspace. Just as my home computer is constantly attacked by viruses, worms and Trojan horses, so will be my pacemaker, my hearing aid and my nanotech immune system. If I don’t update my body’s anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that the millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.

The stagnancy of energy, lack of interest in life and creativity, unproductiveness and mediocrity which beset so many people is not the consequence of their genetic and biological programming but of parental and social conditioning. The great Otto Rank acknowledged this and correctly rectified Freud's Thanatos concept. He, like several humanist and existential philosophers and psychologists who came later, realized that our Death Instinct or drive manifests itself in the very repression addressed throughout this book. Repression is a form of violence against the Self. Rank and his followers also realized that man's blind conformity to social norms and lack of differentiation from crowd-consciousness also serves to deaden creativity and productivity. They understood that the robotic organization man, behind his cubicle or on his cell-phone, slaving for some faceless corporation, fully embodies the Death Instinct.

I am against allowing the CIA to spend $25 million since 1947 for the express purpose, as stated before, to alter our behavior. Is the State supreme over individuals? Who owns or controls our minds? Why was CIA Director Allen Dulles allowed to order 100 million LSD tablets? Were half the U.S. population going to receive their doses? What gives the CIA and Pentagon the right to define normal, or to determine what is national security? Are we being drugged through food, water and supplied with chemicals so we become slaves and robots? Where is all the cancer coming from? Why the preoccupation with death? Why is the U.S. Government in the business of creating a "Psycho-civilized" world? Who is ordering the ultrasonic waves to lower brain waves of city populations to an alpha state, leaving citizens susceptible to mass propaganda and hypnotic suggestion? These facts have been confirmed by researcher Walter Bowart in 1977. I learned about the project years ago.

it must seem impossible that our robot could have changed so much. Maybe the RECOs were right. Maybe Roz really was defective, and some glitch in her programming had caused her to accidentally become a wild robot. Or maybe Roz was designed to think and learn and change; she had simply done those things better than anyone could have imagined. However it happened, Roz felt lucky to have lived such an amazing life. And every moment had been recorded in her computer brain. Even her earliest memories were perfectly clear. She could still see the sun shining through the gash in her crate. She could still hear the waves crashing against the shore. She could still smell the salt water and the pine trees. Would she ever see and hear and smell those things again? Would she ever again climb a mountain, or build a lodge, or play with a goose? Not just a goose. A son. Brightbill had been Roz’s son from the moment she picked up his egg. She had saved him from certain death, and then he had saved her. He was the reason Roz had lived so well

Historically, holism had been a break from the reductionist methods of science. Holism (...) is a way of viewing the universe as a web of interactions and relationships. Whole systems (and the universe can be seen as an overarching system of systems) have properties beyond those of their parts. All things are, in some sense, alive, or a part of a living system; the real world of mind and matter, body and consciousness, cannot be understood by reducing it to pieces and parts. 'Matter is mind' – this is perhaps the holists' quintessential belief. The founding theories of holism had tried to explain how mind emerges from the material universe, how the consciousness of all things is interconnected. The first science, of course, had failed utterly to do this. The first science had resigned human beings to acting as objective observers of a mechanistic and meaningless universe. A dead universe. The human mind, according to the determinists, was merely the by-product of brain chemistry. Chemical laws, the way the elements combine and interact, were formulated as complete and immutable truths. The elements themselves were seen as indivisible lumps of matter, devoid of consciousness, untouched and unaffected by the very consciousnesses seeking to understand how living minds can be assembled from dead matter. The logical conclusion of these assumptions and conceptions was that people are like chemical robots possessing no free will. No wonder the human race, during the Holocaust Century, had fallen into insanity and despair. Holism had been an attempt to restore life to this universe and to reconnect human beings with it. To heal the split between self and other. (...) Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. It has been formalized and canonized, and taught to the swarms of humanity searching for a fundamental unity. Only, human beings have learned it as a theory and a doctrine, not as an experience. A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger, and snowworms roasting over a fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child) to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across the light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each haemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone. It was partly the fault of holism that a whole civilization had suffered the abandonment of its finest senses, ten thousand trillion islands of consciousness born into the pain and promise of neverness, awaiting death with glassy eyes and murmured abstractions upon their lips, always fearing life, always longing for a deeper and truer experience of living.

against the velvet rope force fields that kept everyone without an invitation at bay. As I walked toward the entrance, the crowd bombarded me with a mix of insults, autograph requests, death threats, and tearful declarations of undying love. I had my body shield activated, but surprisingly, no one took a shot at me. I flashed the cyborg doorman my invitation, then mounted the long crystal staircase leading up into the club. Entering the Distracted Globe was more than a little disorienting. The inside of the giant sphere was completely hollow, and its curved interior surface served as the club’s bar and lounge area. The moment you passed through the entrance, the laws of gravity changed. No matter where you walked, your avatar’s feet always adhered to the interior of the sphere, so you could walk in a straight line, up to the “top” of the club, then back down the other side, ending up right back where you started. The huge open space in the center of the sphere served as the club’s zero-gravity “dance floor.” You reached it simply by jumping off the ground, like Superman taking flight, and then swimming through the air, into the spherical zero-g “groove zone.” As I stepped through the entrance, I glanced up—or in the direction that was currently “up” to me at the moment—and took a long look around. The place was packed. Hundreds of avatars milled around like ants crawling around the inside of a giant balloon. Others were already out on the dance floor—spinning, flying, twisting, and tumbling in time with the music, which thumped out of floating spherical speakers that drifted throughout the club. In the middle of all the dancers, a large clear bubble was suspended in space, at the absolute center of the club. This was the “booth” where the DJ stood, surrounded by turntables, mixers, decks, and dials. At the center of all that gear was the opening DJ, R2-D2, hard at work, using his various robotic arms to work the turntables. I recognized the tune he was playing: the ’88 remix of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” with a lot of Star Wars droid sound samples mixed in. As I made my way to the nearest bar, the avatars I passed all stopped to stare and point in

By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point. Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any individual’s weakest points. If the same ordeals were imposed on captured terrorists who were known to be guilty of killing innocent civilians, the officers in charge would get thrown in the brig. Still, no matter how many Herculean physical challenges are presented to a DEVGRU candidate, the brutal training is primarily mental. It reveals each soldier’s principal foe to be himself. His mortal fears and deepest survival instinct emerge time after time as the essential demons he must overcome. Each DEVGRU member must reach beyond mere proficiency at dealing death. He must become two fighters combined: one who is trained to a state of robotic muscle memory in specific dark skills, and a second who is fluidly adaptive, using an array of standard SEAL tactics. Only when he can live and work from within this state of mind will he be trusted to pursue black operations in every form of hostile environment. Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described: Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are - and is possible, blow up something. Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.

I think ghostliness is a good quality. I pretend I'm dead all the time." "What?" He stopped rummaging through his locker to look at me full in the face a last. "It helps me go to sleep," I said. "That shows you don't know anything about death," Jonah said. "Do you?" I asked. He hesitated before saying "I'm a g-g-g-ghost, aren't I?" "I think being dead might be nice. Restful." "Death is not restful. It's nothing." "That's what seems restful to me," I said. "The nothing. Not being here. Not being anywhere.

Rescue dogs are trained to perform such responses on command, often in repulsive situations, such as fires, that they would normally avoid unless the entrapped individuals are familiar. Training is accomplished with the usual carrot-and stick method. One might think, therefore, that the dogs perform like Skinnerian rats, doing what has been reinforced in the past, partly out of instinct, partly out of a desire for tidbits. If they save human lives, one could argue, they do so for purely selfish reasons. The image of the rescue dog as a well-behaved robot is hard to maintain, however, in the face of their attitude under trying circumstances with few survivors, such as in the aftermath of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When rescue dogs encounter too many dead people, they lose interest in their job regardless of how much praise and goodies they get. This was discovered by Caroline Hebard, the U.S. pioneer of canine search and rescue, during the Mexico City earthquake of 1985. Hebard recounts how her German shepherd, Aly, reacted to finding corpse after corpse and few survivors. Aly would be all excited and joyful if he detected human life in the rubble, but became depressed by all the death. In Hebard's words, Aly regarded humans as his friends, and he could not stand to be surrounded by so many dead friends: "Aly fervently wanted his stick reward, and equally wanted to please Caroline, but as long as he was uncertain about whether he had found someone alive, he would not even reward himself. Here in this gray area, rules of logic no longer applied." The logic referred to is that a reward is just a reward: there is no reason for a trained dog to care about the victim's condition. Yet, all dogs on the team became depressed. They required longer and longer resting periods, and their eagerness for the job dropped off dramatically. After a couple of days, Aly clearly had had enough. His big brown eyes were mournful, and he hid behind the bed when Hehard wanted to take him out again. He also refused to eat. All other dogs on the team had lost their appetites as well. The solution to this motivational problem says a lot about what the dogs wanted. A Mexican veterinarian was invited to act as stand-in survivor. The rescuers hid the volunteer somewhere in a wreckage and let the dogs find him. One after another the dogs were sent in, picked up the man's scent, and happily alerted, thus "saving" his life. Refreshed by this exercise, the dogs were ready to work again. What this means is that trained dogs rescue people only partly for approval and food rewards. Instead of performing a cheap circus trick, they are emotionally invested. They relish the opportunity to find and save a live person. Doing so also constitutes some sort of reward, but one more in line with what Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher and father of economics, thought to underlie human sympathy: all that we derive from sympathy, he said, is the pleasure of seeing someone else's fortune. Perhaps this doesn't seem like much, but it means a lot to many people, and apparently also to some bighearted canines.

A robot can be a dreamer, but a dreamer can also be a robot.

They’re using tac-nukes in my refrigerator and you’re telling me to calm down?

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.

Perhaps because they were so convinced that traitors rather than the arrival of American troops had cost them victory in 1918, few Nazi leaders ever understood that the real problem for their long-term plans was the United States, not Britain. Nothing else can explain why, just days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the Americans rather than hoping that the war in the Pacific would distract them from Europe. “What does the USA amount to anyway?” asked Hermann Göring, the head of the German air force. Churchill, however, saw exactly what it amounted to. “Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death,” he said of hearing the news about Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all!

Are you afraid of that?” they asked. “Of death?” “Of course,” Mosscap said. “All conscious things are. Why else do snakes bite? Why do birds fly away? But that’s part of the lesson too, I think. It’s very odd, isn’t it? The thing every being fears most is the only thing that’s for certain? It seems almost cruel, to have that so…” “So baked in?

Mack Bolan was not born to kill, as many of his comrades and superiors secretly believed. He was not a mechanically functioning killer-robot, as his sniper-team partners openly proclaimed. He was not even a cold-blooded and ruthless exterminator, as one leftist news correspondent tagged him. Mack was simply a man who could command himself.

I should be dead. But I’m not human, am I?” She swiped a tear of frustration off her face. “Whatever I am makes me stronger, faster, and scary as hell when fighting. I changed, scaled the top of a moving truck, and fought a guy shooting a gun at me.” She ran her hand across her face to wipe away the tears. “I’m a mess. The mud in that ravine got in all the cracks, even my underwear. But the injuries are already almost gone, and somehow, I know all this will heal. Based on you being all pissy, I assume your meeting didn’t go well.” “It took an unanticipated turn.” His tone was odd as he continued to stare at her. “What exactly do you do that involves secrecy and the Crown?” “I can’t tell you.” Something about how he looked at her was different. Her skin tingled like it had before she’d shifted. Survival instinct flared. “Did they order you to…kill me?” It came out of her on a fatigued exhale. Her shoulders drooped. His face remained remote as if trying to wall off emotion. He neither confirmed nor denied, which might as well have been a screaming affirmative. She dropped her chin. He said nothing, so she looked up. He stared intently at her, making her almost shrink in place under the gaze of those thunderous eyes. “Is this when you tell me to leave again?” she asked. “Would you go?” “If they ordered you to kill me, wouldn’t you be forced to come after me? To hunt me down? So, what’s the point in me running unless you like the hunt?” He pushed his hand through his dark hair and stepped away from her. Frustration oozed from him. Seeing him start to lose some of his composure made him less threatening. He wasn’t the robot assassin. She wanted to run her fingers through his thick hair and down his scruff-roughened chiseled jawline to soothe him. Would her touch, if done in comfort, affect him the way she suspected his touch would destroy her? From the way he simply stared at her, she guessed yes. The silence was killing her. “What’s going on here?” “No idea.” He muttered something under his breath that she couldn’t make out. He stepped toward her and slid a finger under her chin to tilt her face upward. Their eyes met and held. “I’m sorry someone hurt you. That you had to fight for your life and went through a windshield.” In a whisper, he added, “I should’ve been there.” The grit in his voice, the despair, as if he’d let her down, packed one hell of a punch. What was she supposed to do with that? Oh dear…God. His hold on her face, how his thumb gently stroked over the skin on her jaw… How he moved in so she could feel the hard surfaces of his body, the concrete chest and abs… All of it swirled together, turning her mind to mush, which was bad when she needed to remain alert. Death… her death was on the line. But she was about to make a very bad decision to let him do whatever the hell he wanted after that declaration. “I made a promise to erase Dom’s kiss. To make you forget. I never go back on my promises.” Like his promise to help her get answers? He didn’t lower his head, but stood there, hesitant. “You’re too hurt right now.” “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She slid her good hand up his shoulders and neck. His muscles twitched under her touch, and his chest rose and fell more rapidly. Feeling how much just her hand on him affected him encouraged her to continue. Cradling the back of his head, she pressed her body into his. As she pulled him toward her mouth, his incredible size and power registered but didn’t intimidate. Didn’t scare her. Her mouth touched his. Warmth on warmth. Once… Twice… Three times. His lips were a lot softer than they appeared. The roughness of his facial scruff scratched her skin.

he wished Nicola was still around to give him some more advice. She was one of the dead, of course. The virus had claimed her the first and only time she’d broken the Guidelines. She’d apparently smashed the lock off her balcony door, stepped outside for just a few seconds, gulping down the air like a desperate drug addict. Those scant breaths had been more than enough; once the COVID-24, or whatever strain they were up to now, got into your lungs, there wasn’t anything the doctors and medical robots could do for you, except make you as comfortable as possible while you wheezed to death in your own bed.

I speak now of the mission the Elders of the council granted to you in the conference chamber. As you remember, your part in the coming task is twofold. In one phase of this you will accompany us to act with us in the great war that must be fought. We have developed a plan in which your help as an advance and secret agent is necessary. You will be told more about that later, when we have embarked. “Now, however, your other mission begins, here on Nor. It is the mission of love for your fellow men. No matter how successful we are in rescuing the men of Atlan, it cannot be that we will rescue all of them. Many must not be rescued! There is nothing we could do for them, poisoned as they are to the point of death. Nor must we allow any of this poison to escape to the dark worlds where it can infect others. Too, the dero influence is dangerous, and madness must not spread over the universe. “Thus, it has been given to you to inscribe on imperishable plates of telonion, our eternal metal, a message to future man which will be placed on and in Mu so that those who have the intelligence to find and read it may benefit by the truths of growth and defense against a too-soon death by age. “After the passing of Atlan science from Mu, men will begin to die at the same age, and their sons will all be the same size at the same age. This will be caused by accumulations of sun-poison in the water of Mu, which will stop all growth in mankind at almost the very beginning of their development. They will scarcely get beyond childhood before they will begin to die. “These plates you will inscribe will contain a message that is a key and a path to the door that will open life value to these future men, whose fate we know and pity, but cannot prevent. We can only teach them what we know that will enable them to get the most out of their life on Mu. The dero will not be able to read, and thus will die as they should. Those whose minds are powerful enough to escape complete dero-robotism will read and profit. “You can tell them how to attain this life growth by freeing their food and water intake of all the poisons that will be found in it in the natural state. The age poisons can be removed by centrifuge and by still; their air can be made a nutrient by proper treatment and freed of all its detrimental ions by field sweeps of electric. The exd on which the basic integration of life feeds can be concentrated (just as it was in your body in the growth school tank) in energy flows which greatly increase the rate of growth and the solidity and weight of the flesh. “Tell future man to do these things, Mutan Mion, and their reward will be great. You have seen what the reward of such effort can be—in thousands of years of life’s fullness—even on a planet under a detrimental sun. We cannot save those men yet unborn. We can only leave for them the heritage that is rightfully theirs, the heritage of our sciencon knowledge. And you, Mutan, in your infinite love and pity for your fellow men, shall perform this task with all the energy that your love makes possible!

Thoughts of his future, and eventual death, have altered Jack22's perspective. And as I mentioned before, his intellect is aging rather rapidly. To gain extraordinary knowledge so quickly without personal experience makes his learning incomplete. You don't truly understand the word "burn" until your hand is over the flame.

I wanted to do animation for adults; films like Fritz the Cat (1972) that were shown as midnight movies and had an edge to them.

The next crucial step was picking the correct stories and assembling the ideal talent to tackle each episode.

One of the significant aspects of Love, Death + Robots is that it offers up a buffet of the visual styles and technologies available in animation today.

For Homer, glory was the only thing that was truly imperishable. Only the glorious live on after death, in the memories and stories of humanity. Glory is the only meaningful form of immortality. The abject creature that lives on in the underworld holds no appeal. In fact, Homer’s theology demands a dismal afterlife. That way, the heroes are fully motivated to achieve glory here and now. What else is there to aim for? The grim persistence of the soul after death is in every way unappealing. Do you want a mediocre life and an even more mediocre death?

Your conscience is what you do, not what you think or say you think. It’s also something you do when it has to be done, not as an afterthought when you’re forced to face up to your wrongdoing. Remorse is cheap and easy. It’s an insult. My awareness obliged me to act, but I did nothing: I cooperated, and my compliance enabled something monstrous. I didn’t slaughter millions, but there’s no sliding scale in atrocities, even if the robotic imagination of the law requires fixed thresholds. Each death, each act of suffering, is a complete and qualifying act of evil in itself. Humans instinctively norm. We behave like others around us, because compliance is our survival strategy. No matter how intelligent, sensible, or kind, 99 percent of human beings will carry out the most appalling acts if the rest of their tribe is doing the same. And most of our conscious acts are simply postscript rationalizations of our hard-wired unconscious decisions.

Thousand Leagues Under the Sea out like a sword. “What are you going to do?” The Magister turned to her. “First, as I promised, I’ll free all fictional creatures I can find. I’ve explained the way things work to my friends, here. And they’d like to speak to their creators, much as I’d still like to.” He held out a hand. “Give me Jonathan Porterhouse, and no harm shall come to you.” Bethany swallowed hard. “What for?” “He will accompany any and all other writers into a fictional world, where they will be free to live or die as they can.” He spread his hands. “It is the only way to ensure an end to their power, and seems the fairest way to imprison them. After all, it is no more than they have done to us.” Bethany’s eyes went wide. “You can’t just send everyone into books! Do you have any idea what would happen?” “Do you know what happened to me?” the Magister roared. “Fighting a war for the freedom of my people, only to find none of it is real? Let the writers of this world decide if their dystopian futures, their dangerous magic, their monsters and stories of terror are so entertaining once it’s their own life or death they’re living out!” Her legs shaking, Bethany took a step forward. “I’m not going to let you do this,” she said quietly. “I can’t.” “Bethany, don’t,” Kiel whispered to her, but she shook her head. “There’s nothing you can do that I can’t undo,” she told the Magister. “So go ahead. Steal my power some more. I’ll just find a way to put everything back where it belongs, and will keep at it as long as I live.” “I understand,” the Magister said. “Then I suppose you leave me with no other option.” “NO!” Kiel shouted, but it was too late. The Magister gestured, and Bethany immediately crumpled to the ground, unmoving. CHAPTER 30 What’s the problem?” Charm said, waving her robotic hand for Owen to hurry up. “We don’t have much more time!” “Give me a minute,” Owen told her, trying not to look at the skeleton sitting on the computer-circuit throne. Kiel had mentioned wanting to bring his parents back to life using magic (before he found out he was a clone of Dr. Verity, of course), but the Magister had always forbidden it, saying that such dark magic led to horrible results.

It’s true, death scenes are my specialty,” said the opossum. “But I have a wide dramatic range, believe me.

What I have done is to choose between the death of my body and the death of my aspirations and desires. To have let my body live at the cost of the greater death - That is the true violation of the Third Law. Not this. As a robot I might live forever, yes. But I tell you that I would rather die as a man than live eternally as a robot.

All facts are not known to be composed but tight and young to a point. Death is nearing me, I feel that I see that, they want that. ME- watches the doors open to admit me in the rush upwards. The doors slide closed behind him. Then a muffled red laser-ROUND like an endless machine gun I hear a kid yells out. I walk and not look, as they tumble down in a lined-up row, all death no reason. Turns back to the screens. YOU- I gave you an order... you the order not to kill her I ran to the desk, of the hands that run the government, robotics departments. ‘Yes- we hear your cries out for help yet that rain the math that we can, or you don’t have.’ FREAK YOU! She has by the tie, I don’t see kill your life, that you don’t even understand, I think we can see more than enough looking over the wall screens, at the wastes. You killed my baby girl off- Kantilla! The Robot did not us, she was one point away from life, pushed back towards the door. The gun on my back- go or die. Killer robots, not of the laws, I never thought it possible. Shaking in its hand, I see as mothers cry. Happy for the clean-up as they say. Bodies burnt in a large firebox in the mid-city, see the black smoke for kilometers. Mass graves are wanted and have been in place now, it’s all the same no name to be remembered by, just a large hologram in the full finger, saying lines- as I love you, on your wrist is not life to me or having them here. I am desperate and unclear, and incompatible. She touches the WALL PANEL making her way back to her appearance in the high rise, without her young life. The doors slide open. The Robot, said I am sorry for your loss today, ‘Anything I can do,’ as she goes and weeps, ‘Yeah, FREAK OFF!

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

Theory number four pertaining to the origin of demons—“Spirits of Wicked Men Deceased”—is based on the popular idea that good humans become angels and evil humans become demons at death.  In what ways does our culture support this notion?  Do we tell our children that loved ones (mommy, siblings, etc.) become angels

Human extinction may occur through the evolution of a purely-technological robotic system with no need for fallible human intellects. Ironically enough, this would occur even if Ray Kurzweil’s fantasy of a purely technical solution to death were discovered. Even if it were possible to keep humans alive forever, it would violate the laws of self-propagating systems to do so if these humans had lost their usefulness. The latter is guaranteed by exactly these laws, since the robotic minds would continually develop themselves in order to gain competitive advantage in the context of Natural Selection:

Naturally, immunity is a natural physician that fends off all invading bacteria and viruses, whereas food becomes its medicine or trouble since that appears to increase or decrease your immune system; thus, choose the right and healthy food, and adopt this proverb: Eat to be alive, not live to eat. Experienced and qualified doctors understand the side effects of medicines before the prescription. Indeed, the majority of doctors hold a professional degree and certificate, whereas virtually none of them has the latest and accurate knowledge; as a result, it executes no difference between such doctors and a robot. When naturopathy experts and spiritual figures predict with significant certainty that you have no cancer or whatever other sickness, it confuses, surprises, and creates suspicious feelings in your mind, whereas doctors have diagnosed metastatic cancer. What should one believe and what not? However, one’s enemies are still awaiting its death. One breathes, expecting and waiting for the miracle of God; it will soon happen if one believes. You neither feel trust in your family doctor and specialists nor feel satisfaction with their treatment. You always realize that they do not tell the truth about how risky your disease is, and they never discuss it. If doctors fail to meet your sufferings of mucus, shortness of breath, and swallowing difficulties because of medication’s side effects, they will indeed put you on medical victimization, ignoring the better quality of life that the medical system promises. Most doctors work for the insurance companies instead of caring for patients. It is factually a medical crime that doctors, hospitals, or insurance providers put patients at high risk. Many doctors do not respect patients’ requests to fulfill it because patients want treatment according to international medical guidelines. Such refusal results in the spreading of their suffering. It saddens patients that the doctors only think about the insurance provider and not the patient. Indeed, such a situation can put one on the track in a dilemma. However, one’s experience and others may prove that none of the medicines give patients a good quality of life, whether homeopathy, allopathy, naturopathy, or even a spiritual one. If your fate stands as a barrier in front of you, no one sees or realizes what you have faced and is still facing worries about your health. Factually, robot doctors cannot provide significant information that may help to ease patients’ suffering; there is only one way to change lifestyle and stay strict on diet; it will have a better result than medicine, which is full of toxins that damage patients’ health instead of curing it. One can think or predict that the medical world has become a medical trade in which one cannot exclude the medical mafia. Is it a valid context that requires an authentic answer?

What's strange is that small changes upset me immensely and always have done. A tree trimmed outside my house, the reorganization of a supermarket aisle, a new haircut, an updated app format. I cried for hours when they "new and improved" the recipe for the mashed potato I eat every Monday night. But the big stuff? The deaths, the tragedies, the life-changing shifts that rock everyone else to their core? That's when I'm cool, calm and collected. It's why I had to give three speeches at my own parents' funeral, and also--I'm assuming--why I heard my great-uncle Joseph call me an "empty robot" under his breath when I sat back down again. I don't understand it, but there's just something in me that knows how to stand still when the earth shatters.

It’s difficult to imagine that Artificial Intelligence will take the place of people but many believe that it’s only a short time before computers will outthink us. They already can beat our best chess players and have been able to out calculate us since calculators first came onto the scene. IBM’s Watson is on the cutting edge of Cognitive Computers, being used to out think our physicians but closer to home, for the greatest part; our cars are no longer assembled by people but rather robots. Our automobiles can be considered among our first robots, since they took the place of horses. Just after the turn of the last century when the population in the United States crossed the 100 M mark the number of horses came to 20M. Now we have a population of 325 M but only 9 M horses. You might ask what happened. Well back in 1915 there were 2.4 M cars but this jumped to 3.6 M in just one year. Although horses still out-numbered cars the handwriting was on the wall! You might think that this doesn’t apply to us but why not? The number of robots increase, taking the place of first our workers on the assembly line and then workers in the food industry and this takes us from tractors and combines on the farms to the cooking and serving hamburgers at your favorite burger joint. People are becoming redundant! That’s right we are becoming superfluous! Worldwide only 7 out of 100 people have college degrees and here in the United States only 40% of our working population possesses a sheep skin, although mine is printed on ordinary paper. With education becoming ever more expensive, we as a population are becoming ever more uneducated. A growing problem is that as computers and robots become smarter, as they are, we are no longer needed to be anything more than a consumer and where will the money come from for that? I recently read that this death spiral will run its course within 40 years! Nice statistics that we’re looking at…. Looking at the bright side of things you can now buy an atomically correct, life sized doll, as perhaps a robotic non-complaining, companion for under $120. In time these robotic beings will be able to talk back but hopefully there will be an off switch. As interesting as this sounds it will most likely not be for everyone, however it may appeal to some of our less capable, not to have to actually interface with real live people. The fact is that most people will soon outlive their usefulness! We as a society are being challenged and there will soon be little reason for our being. When machines make machines that can out think us; when we become dumb and superfluous, then what? Are we ready for this transition? It’s scary but If nothing else, it’s something to think about….

Once you’ve got a file, you needn’t fear death—you can always be re-uploaded into a synthetic human body, or, he says, “some kind of robot.” It doesn’t matter what the vessel is, according to Anders, because it would experience consciousness in exactly the same way as we do.

For all I know, there could be man-sized murderous robots on the other side of the doors! That ride unicorns! And kiss you to death!

Sorry I called you an idiot,” Professor Quigley said to the yellow endergirl. “I always get a bit tetchy when I’m about to be crushed to death by a 10,000 foot robot.

Death is no cure for ignorance.

Our broken criminal justice system has rejected individual justice and discretion it requires, and instead insists on robotic and inflexible mandatory sentencing, sentencing guidelines, death sentences, life without possibility of parole, the actual or de facto elimination of sentence modifications, pardons, commutations, expungement, and record sealing.” - Lary Krasner

You’re unlikely to find death anywhere near a tomb.  Everyone there is already dead. Death’s business is among the living.

The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated caution, toward the door; these movements it performed in the manner of a prodigiously shitfaced man intent on demonstrating that he had only had a couple of sherries with dinner.

Well what would you have us do, Jason? Swan into a hardware store without any cash and say “give us your best rack or we’ll set the adorable button-nosed robots on you for bunny-boiler death by cuddling?" Jared Thomas in Red Gods Sing

was sick of people in the program quoting the principles of the Big Book. I wanted to scream when I heard, “But for the grace of God.” What fucking grace had God given me? And don’t get me started on the gratitude list. I had no gratitude. The distress and loneliness made me again consider ending my life. I thought the program was a trick to psychologically prevent me from slicing my wrists. Quotations like “Easy does it,” “This shall too pass,” “Thanks for sharing,” “Keep coming back,” did nothing for me but induce intestinal illness. Holding hands and watching people go out of their way to do anything and everything for me made me extremely uncomfortable. I loathed the closeness and companionship of the people who were working hard for my benefit. The disgrace of not having my own form of transportation, career, dignity, and independence made me resent everything this horrible existence had to offer. I held these feelings inside and operated like a robot going through the motions of living. I contemplated how to extinguish my mental anguish. Death is what first came to mind. I'd fantasize driving at a hundred miles an hour into a tree, taking a full bottle of Valium or Trazadone, or, better yet, taking a full bottle of both drugs and then doing it. But something inside woke me up, convincing me there was a certain merit, some reason worth living for on this miserable planet. From there, my determination and drive to attain dignity and independence kicked in. I wanted to believe there truly was a good person inside. I wanted to find him. Insidious images of relaxation flashed through my mind like bright pictures. It was as though all my tension was being released after inhaling a fat line of cocaine while watching porn. The excitement of reliving the act seemed so real that my heart palpitated erratically. I'd get furious with myself for even thinking about going back to that sinister part of my life. When I returned to the Oxford House after the retreat, I was introduced to a local priest who was in the fellowship for treatment. When I first found out he was a priest, I couldn’t stand the sight of him. It disgusted me that people gave him respect because he was a man of the cloth. The fellow addicts thought it was cool they had one of God’s errant angels among them confessing his sins of addictions. Little

Sometimes there are fates worse than death.

You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives.

The death of Opportunity Rover proves even robots can't survive on Mars

The pain-free death is that; which suddenly and speedy happens as heart failure, in deeply sleeping since that occurs stainless and save from the doctors' robotic minds and experiments, and even fees.

It was odd how that last deed caught the imagination of the world. All that Andrew had done before had not swayed them. But he had finally accepted even death to be human, and the sacrifice was too great to be rejected.

And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs for which there is no key. It seems strange almost to mention his name over here. There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped with the German trade-mark, with the double eagle. The serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the drowsy stupor of a German burgeois deity. Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning.

On the day of the universe’s Last Judgment, two humans and a robot belonging to the Earth and Trisolaran civilizations embraced each other in ecstasy.

That's really what all books are, isn't it? I mean, lists of secrets and things you only wish you’d done - a sort of deathbed confession where you're trying to get it all out while the lights are still on.

And if we were stuck here forever - and maybe this was just a naturally morbid thought for a teenage boy- I wondered who among us would die first and who ultimately would be left alone.

Nonsense. You aren’t alive to begin with,” I pointed out. “Suck it up and make the best of it, Milo. The future is bright, I assure you.” “We come into existence, and we float through space, doomed, until we all die horribly. No reason to live at all.” Milo the busboy wept uncontrollably. He probably knew more than I did, but who can say?

Again, for the record, let me restate: you can't be rude to a coffee grinder and only an idiot would thank it for pulverizing beans. But you could, and probably should, unplug it if it doesn't shut up.