"Okay, there’s a basic split, there are two kinds of robotics people. There are people who want robots to be useful and there are people who want robots to be like humans, and those are pretty much disjoint sets of people and they fight with each other and I’m clearly on the side of, “I want to understand what it means to be a person,” robots are a way for me to do that understanding and my idea of a good robot is it’s like a person, behaves like a person, looks like a person. Isaac Asimov, and of course many, many other science fiction writers and movie generators, so, “Metropolis,” the robot looks like a person. It’s a lot easier, you have an actor be your robot so they naturally look like people, but a lot of these people believe that that’s what a robot should look like and so they’re on my side. In the 1970s I can remember as a graduate student, or I guess 1980s, a professor named Warren Seering in the Mechanical Engineering Department wrote an article for I guess the MIT alumni magazine, Technology Review, which basically said if you wanna build VCRs your robot should not look like a person, it should look like a VCR making device, and he was absolutely right but the politics of this message were really bad. It basically said, “Don’t fund all these crazy people who want to build people or artificial people, fund people who are going to do something useful to society,” because at that time the reason robotics was hot was because we were trying to deal with the Japanese and the perception that automation was making them much more competitive relative to us and our trade balance was therefore terrible. That fear has receded now and we have terrible trade balances with places like China, which has little or no automation, so there are other issues going on as well."