Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future.

My goal is to create friend machines. Friendly genius machines. Machines with genius capabilities.

Robots will someday, or maybe, wake up. They may be really smart. They may be as creative, smart and capable as human beings, and fully conscious, and self discerning with free will.

Nobody complains that Bernini's sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell's paintings are too creepy. Well, robots can seem real and be loved, too. We're trying to make a new art medium out of robotics.

We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.

My wife and I have four children, and none of them are in lab science, so clearly I returned home at night and presented a fairly unattractive example of a scientific life.

I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe.