Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast and the impact of the change on society and technology is global not local.

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.

People always say golfers don't smile. But there is so much psychology in golf so we have to be a bit robotic.

I'm not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians they can act out Will and the Robot.

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant artistically alert community should be doing. After all it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

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.

There are things that I invented - the creaky geriatric robot that is always grumpy for example or the little wheelie guy he's not in the Hasbro lore. But kids love that stuff - this little guy as a pet on a chain. They gravitate towards it.

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

We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision action reasoning planning and so forth. We even used some structural learning such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals robotics artificial intelligence nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.