When I was building robots in the early 1990s, the problems of voice recognition, image understanding, VOIP, even touchscreen technologies - these were robotics problems.

The idea that a robot will become more aware of its environment, that telling it to 'go to the kitchen' means something - navigation and understanding of the environment is a robot problem. Those are the technological frontiers of the robotics industry.

There are so many opportunities to make a bad decision in building a robot company on top of all the normal ways that entrepreneurs screw up that it is incredibly difficult to truly create value because it is so cost-sensitive.

Building robot versions of people is very expensive.

A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career.

We focus on a unique form of artificial intelligence called artificial swarm intelligence.

Early AI was mainly based on logic. You're trying to make computers that reason like people. The second route is from biology: You're trying to make computers that can perceive and act and adapt like animals.

As we become more codependent with technology, it's not necessarily based on our desire for the technology but our desire for interconnectivity and wanting to stay connected, which is a natural human instinct. The technology itself is kind of emotionally manipulative.