Daniel H. Wilson
Daniel H. Wilson
Daniel H. Wilsonis a New York Times best selling author, television host and robotics engineer. Wilson is a contributing editor to Popular Mechanics magazine, called the "Resident Roboticist". He currently resides in Portland, Oregon. His books include the award-winning humor titles How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where's My Jetpack? and How to Build a Robot Army and the bestseller Robopocalypse. His most recent novel, Robogenesis was published in June 2014...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 March 1978
CountryUnited States of America
For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's dangerous to be people-blind.
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.
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.
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.
Technology changes, but people stay the same.
Demolition is a part of construction.
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.