More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“How do you know it’s coming to you, Dad?” “By very clever deduction. One: there’s no one else here who has any connection with the Police Department; and two: that miserable thing is heading right toward me.
To Baley, it seemed not that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.
History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living.
Are there Laws of Humanics as there are Laws of Robotics? How many Laws of Humanics might there be and how can they be expressed mathematically? I don’t know.
He thought uncomfortably: A robot corpse is much more human than a human corpse.
I never met my mother, of course, but her name was on my charts. And she’s still alive, as far as I know, so I could see her—but I think there’s something queasy about meeting someone in whose womb you once were.
You don’t understand, I’m afraid, the intensity of the feelings that Aurorans—and Spacers generally—have toward Earthpeople. I don’t share those feelings, mind you, and I am, for instance, quite at ease with you. I don’t have that primitive fear of infection, I don’t imagine that you smell bad, I don’t attribute to you all sorts of personality traits that I find offensive, I don’t think that you and yours are plotting to take our lives or steal our property—but the large majority of Aurorans have all these attitudes. It may not be very close to the surface and Aurorans may bring themselves to
...more
The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)
“Are you well, sir?” asked Giskard. It was a foolish question, dictated by the programming of the robot, thought Baley, though, at that, it was no worse than the questions asked by human beings, sometimes with wild inappropriateness, out of the programming of etiquette.
he was suddenly sorry for the babies for whom everything was done and who were not sufficiently conscious of it to enjoy it.
He ate three pachinkas and it was only shame that kept him from asking for more. He licked at his fingers without urging and eschewed the use of napkins, for he wanted none of it to be wasted on an inanimate object.
