Daniel H. Wilson Quotes

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

Memories fade but words hang around forever.

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

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.

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

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

...humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm.

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.

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

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.

It's dangerous to be people-blind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Technology changes, but people stay the same.

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

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.

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.

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.