Quotes – Page 15

Robots tend to displace human labor. The robot economy moves only in one direction. More robots and fewer humans. I've studied population data very carefully and I've plotted it and made a few extrapolations.

The robot-human ratio in any economy that has accepted robot labor tends continously to increase despite any laws that are passed to prevent it. The increase is slowed, but never stopped.

At first the human population increases, but the robot population increases much more quickly.

Then after a certain critical point is reached, the human population actually begins to decline.

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness.

As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more.

Culture dictates invention.

Any world is queer to people who don't live on it.

Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without them

There are degrees of justice. When the lesser is incompatible with the greater, the lesser must give way.

We can't ever build a robot that will be even as good as a human being in anything that counts, let alone better.

We can't create a robot with a sense of beauty or a sense of ethics or a sense of religion.

There's no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism.

We can't, damm it, we can't.

Not as long as we don't understand what makes our brains tick.

Not as long as things exist that science can't measure.

What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God?

We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.

It's what makes us men.

Can a wish be anything but conscious?

Is that not a contradiction in terms?

People sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix others, because they don't know how to fix themselves.

There had always been prophets of Malthusian doom in every generation since Medieval times and they had always proofen wrong.