The Navy said the perceptron would be the first non-living mechanism capable of receiv­ing, recognizing and identifying its surroundings without any human training or control

“There are two things about the human soul on which all the knowledge we can have of its nature depends: one of which is that it thinks, and the other is that, being united to the body, it can act on and be acted upon by it” – Descartes to Elisabeth, 21 May 1643

Developers did not want its appearance to be over-human, as this would “encourage false expectations with regard to its capabilities” for users…

The case of the use of the abacus by Japanese school children and adults … tool’s use becomes incorporated into a culture-specific technology

Complicated mental processes are entirely reducible to such simple activities as the attentive observation of statements previously accepted as true, the perception of structural, purely external, connections among these statements, and the execution of mechanical transformations as prescribed by the rules of inference

You young badgers imagine that it would be enough to smear a pound of paint on the canvas and you’re already a modern painter. I would be willing to accept this abomination for a bad joke, if there was even the slightest humor behind it. But this here is an abracadabra! A nothing!

The resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

I do think that robots deserve rights and there are research projects being carried out today that are looking at robot laws. African-American slaves were given rights when slavery was abolished and they became part of society. Think of animals too – none of them had rights in the beginning but now animal rights are the norm. So if robots can interact with humans, they too should be given rights.

They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifacts… novel living machines

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. [… ] And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us […] All these things we endure from the brain, when it is not healthy