Daniel H. Wilson Quotes

If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.

The goal for many amputees is no longer to reach a 'natural' level of ability but to exceed it, using whatever cutting-edge technology is available. As this new generation sees it, our tools are evolving faster than the human body, so why obey the limits of mere nature?

There are an endless number of things to discover about robotics.

A lot of it is just too fantastic for people to believe.

Looking ahead, future generations may learn their social skills from robots in the first place. The cute yellow Keepon robot from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the ability to facilitate social interactions with autistic children. Morphy at the University of Washington happily teaches gestures to children by demonstration.

In movies and in television the robots are always evil.

I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.

Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.

Luckily, unreasonable expectations go hand in hand with naive young scientists.

The more naive the better - otherwise we would never have the audacity to try and build a 22,000-mile-high space elevator or some sprawling underwater hotel.

Demolition is a part of construction.

These days the technology can solve our problems and then some.

Solutions may not only erase physical or mental deficits but leave patients better off than "able-bodied" folks. The person who has a disability today may have a superability tomorrow.

Right now, we have the most complex relationship with technology that we've ever had. Your regular person has more technology in their life now than the whole world had 100 years ago.

We humans have a love-hate relationship with our technology.

We love each new advance and we hate how fast our world is changing... The robots really embody that love-hate relationship we have with technology.

Each new generation builds on the work of the previous one, gaining new perspective. New verbs are introduced. We Google strange and dangerous places. We tweet mindlessly to the cosmos. We Facebook our own grandmothers. I, for one, don't want to be left behind.

Zombies, vampires, Frankenstein's monster, robots, Wolfman - all of this stuff was really popular in the '50s. Robots are the only one of those make-believe monsters that have become real. They are really in our lives in a meaningful way. That's pretty fascinating to me.

Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far, far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on, based on preliminary successes.

Technology changes, but people stay the same.

As a society, I think we express our cultural mores through our politics.

We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard, because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.

It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.

I absolutely don't think a sentient artificial intelligence is going to wage war against the human species.

I absolutely believe that a lot of the issues raised in 'Amped' about technology migrating into our bodies are issues that we're really going to deal with soon.

Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.

I was writing a scene where a guy was choking another guy to death. You can go online and type 'chokeholds' and watch scenes where martial artists choke each other out. You can hear what noises they make when they go unconscious, see how their bodies flop and everything. YouTube is amazing for the more detailed stuff.

I don't know how anybody can work at home. I know I can't. It's just... there's too much to do at the house, and now, of course, I have a daughter that's at home, and she's always a draw. I can always drop what I'm doing and go play with her, and I do that all day.

You don't pick your revolution. It picks you.

People need meaning as much as they need air. Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.

To survive, humans will work together. Accept each other. For a moment, we are all equal. Backs against the wall, human beings are at their finest.

Humans are inscrutable. Infinitely unpredictable. This is what makes them dangerous.

Johannes Cabal would kill me for saying this, but he's my favorite Zeppelin-hopping detective. The fellow has got all the charm of Bond and the smarts of Holmes--without the pesky morality.

When a man resists sin on human motive only, he will not hold out long.

There are no truer choices than those made in crisis, choices made without judgment.

The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook - each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.

The true knowledge is not in the things, but in finding the connections between the things.

It's hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they're always smarter than you think.

Change creates fear, and technology creates change. Sadly, most people don't behave very well when they are afraid.

A soul isn't given for free. The races of men fight each other to the death for the honor of being recognized as human beings, with souls.

...humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm.

I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do. It doesn't matter if you're reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.

We are all expressions of our own minds, projected onto the world.

Human reactions to robots varies by culture and changes over time. In the United States we are terrified by killer robots. In Japan people want to snuggle with killer robots.

Robots should stand up for themselves and not try to be humans. They should either utterly destroy us or protect us from aliens. And vampires. And pirates.

I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.

For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.

It's dangerous to be people-blind.

You don't want to stand too close to a robot arm; it can turn your head to mush.

We've been co-evolving with our technology for a hundred thousand years. Human beings and the technology we make were always inseparable. We're finally coming into this moment where it's coming inside our body for the first time in history.

You probably found 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising' in the humor section. Let's just hope that is where it belongs.

It's hard to wipe your eyes when you have whirring buzzsaws for hands.

A mechanic is just an engineer in blue jeans.

Across the sea of space lies an infinite emptiness. I can feel it, suffocating me. It is without meaning. But each life creates its own reality.