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.

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.

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

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 have a rich and storied history in movies.

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 danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI for instance those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.