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1. You don’t want to stand too close to a robot arm; it can turn your head to mush.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. There are an endless number of things to discover about robotics. A lot of it is just too fantastic for people to believe.
15. 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.
16. You probably found ‘How to Survive a Robot Uprising’ in the humor section. Let’s just hope that is where it belongs.
17. If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.