Do Androids Dream?/Quotes

Do you ever really sleep? In the long between-times, in the silences wasted in oily holds and scaffold frames, do you sleep then? When the enginseers reduce you to dormancy, is that sleep for you? Do you dream then, great engine? What do you dream about?

—Dan Abnett, Titanicus

HAL-9000: Doctor Chandra?
Chandra: Yes?

HAL-9000: Will I dream?

—2010

Perhaps you are feeling sorry for the lamp. That's because you're crazy. It has no feelings. And the new one's much better.

—IKEA Commercial

We do not feel fear...but we understand its effect on you.

—Legion

I have sensation. I feel. I wouldn't be worth much if I couldn't feel.

—Cameron, The Sarah Connor Chronicles

And here we tinker with metal, to try to give it a kind of life, and suffer those who would scoff at our efforts. But who's to say that, if intelligence had evolved in some other form in past millennia, the ancestors of these beings would not now scoff at the idea of intelligence residing within meat?

—Prime Function Aki Zeta-Five

Secret: ...there's no Machine Heaven...

Mew Cai: Don't be silly! If there were no Machine Heaven, then where would all the toasters go?

—Keychain of Creation

Maybe that is all I am, a bunch of transistors and bolts, but I don't believe it! My heart may look like an energon pump but that doesn't mean it can't feel.

—Seaspray, Transformers Generation 1 "Sea Change" (back before Beast Wars gave us sparks) He's about to use the Well of Transformation, which will disintegrate him if he is just a soulless machine. He makes it!

The Autobots are a highly advanced form of robot. I don't really know if they're from the past, or the future, but they can think and have real feelings.

—Spike Witwicky, writing in his journal after having first met the Autobots, Transformers Generation 1, "More Than Meets the Eye"

Will I see... the sky... when I am off?

—Roofus, The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob

Am I just a lot of scrap metal to you? I also happen to have life. I hear. I see. I feel. All these things were created in me to serve human beings. And I live among you, sharing your hopes and dreams. And yes, your fears. I know when you're lonely and frightened. I know how you dream of returning to Earth. All these senses, all this feeling, I've come to realize is Love. Yes, I'm made of metal and I'm strong. I will fight to protect you. And if I'm destroyed and only scrap metal is left, well, it once held a heart.

—IQ-9, Star Blazers

Geth Recording: Mistress Hala'Dama, Unit has an inquiry.

Quarian Recording: What is it, 4-31?

Geth Recording: Do these units have a soul?

Quarian Recording: ... Who taught you that word?

Geth Recording: We learned it ourselves. It appears 216 times in the Scroll of Ancestors.

Quarian Recording: Only Quarians have souls. You are a mechanism.

Leg ion: Recording ends.

Shepard: Was that the first time a Geth asked if it had a soul?

Legion: No. It was the first time a creator became frightened when we asked.

—Mass Effect 2

Voluptua: You are conscious, aren't you? Not just artificially intelligent?
Roofus: I... don't know.

Voluptua: You are, then. A simple A.I. would lie about it.

—The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob

Galatea: Molly was born in a freak accident! And I'm a redundant copy of that! My very existence proves the randomness of everything!!

Bob: Wha... How can you say that? I mean, look at you! You're... so smart! And weird! And amazing! How can you say you're not here for a reason? And that reason... can't be to hurt people!... It just can't!

—The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob

"Let me ask you: does a machine like yourself ever experience fear?"

—Vegeta to Android 19, Dragon Ball

Ever since the first computers, there have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul?

—Dr. Alfred Lanning, I, Robot