I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing.

Two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them - will they need rights eventually? And the other question people ask me is, will they want to take over?

It's reasonable to say that certain things we understand should perhaps have limits on how they're used and how certain technologies are deployed. That's very much what we should do as a society.

In German science, we have a special problem. We lose talented women at the time they get pregnant. Some of it occurs because they are encouraged - by their husbands, bosses and the government - to take long maternity leaves.

We're finding a third way for biologists to change the world. It's very hard to change the world when the only directions available in biology are academia and the pharmaceutical industry.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics, then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn't do anything that people are doing, and we don't really see any evidence that this is not the case.