Daniel H. Wilson Quotations

In the future, when Microsoft leaves a security-flaw in their code it won't mean that somebody hacks your computer. It will mean that somebody takes control of your servant robot and it stands in your bedroom doorway sharpening a knife and watching you sleep.

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.

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 poster boy for our superabled future is Oscar Pistorius, an increasingly famous South African sprinter who happens to have had both of his legs amputated below the knee. Using upside down question mark-shaped carbon fiber sprinting prosthetics, called Cheetah blades, Mr. Pistorius can challenge the fastest sprinters in the world.

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.

Over the past 50 years we got versions of X-ray specs and space vacations, and even death rays. But the X-ray specs don't fit on your face - they're big things that screen your luggage for guns. Space vacations are real, but they cost $20 million. We have death rays, but you have to be a triple Ph.D. to play with them.

You write about what you know. It makes everything easier, and also more truthful. In this case, I grew up in Oklahoma, and I grew up in the Cherokee Nation and I'm a member of the Cherokee Tribe. Oddly enough, I know a lot about robots and Oklahoma, and so that's what comes out in my writing.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.

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

In the end, perhaps it will be the true romantics, not the nerds, who choose to flee from a world of impersonal, digitized relationships and into the arms of simulacrums with manners imported from simpler times.

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.

You can graph human evolution, which is mostly a straight line, but we do get better and change over time, and you can graph technological evolution, which is a line that's going straight up. They are going to intersect each other at some point, and that's happening now.

In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.

There are an endless number of things to discover about robotics. A lot of it is just too fantastic for people to believe.

I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

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.

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'm not saying you have to keep up. But at the moment you choose to stop growing, your world will begin to shrink. You'll be able to communicate with fewer people, especially the young. You will only see reruns. You will not understand how to pay for things. The outside world will become a frightening and unpredictable place.

Right now, I think robots are where it's at. And yes, I'm biased. Robots and space, because with home rocket kits and Lego Mindstorm sets, people can get involved. I was raised on Transformers and GoBots, so I can't imagine what kids who are building real robots are dreaming about.

There are no movie references that I can think of in 'Robopocalypse.' However, there are tons of personal references. For example, the IP address that Lurker tracks actually goes back to the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I studied robotics.

'Robopocalypse' joins a proud tradition of techno-apocalyptic tales, stretching from high-flying Icarus, to Frankenstein's monster, and to many a giant radioactive creature who has crashed the streets of Tokyo. And then, of course, there's the Terminator.

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.

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

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

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

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

'Robopocalypse' explores the intertwined fates of regular people who face a future filled with murderous machines. It follows them as humanity foments the robot uprising, fails to recognize the coming storm, and then is rocked to the core by methodical, crippling attacks.

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

Memories fade but words hang around forever.

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

...humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm.

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.

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

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.

A mechanic is just an engineer in blue jeans.

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.

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.

Demolition is a part of construction.

Technology changes, but people stay the same.

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.

No matter how much kids beg to be treated like adults, nobody likes to let go of their childhood. You wish for it and dream of it and the second you have it, you wonder what you've done. You wonder what it is you've become.

How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning Living for its own sake isn't life. People need meaning as much as they need air.

It's dangerous to be people-blind.

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.

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?

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.

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

Personally, I'm not afraid of a robot uprising. The benefits far outweigh the threats.

You want to know what a robot's designed for. And if it's doing something outside the scope of what it's made to do, you should be very suspicious.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If the knowledge is spread, it cannot be stamped out.

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.

As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.

In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with, but which would just confuse everybody. So in 'Amped,' I focus on neural implants.

A robot-arm in a factory doesn't decide minute by minute whether to rivet or revolt - it just does the job is has literally been trained to do. It's if and when we build a conscious robot that we may have to worry.

The dissemination of advanced implantable technology will likely be just as ruthlessly democratic as the ailments it is destined to treat. Meaning that, someday soon, we may have a new class of very smart, very fast people - yesterday's disabled and elderly.