It really weirds me out to see so many references to Hans Moravec in all the science fiction that I read, and in newspapers and magazines.

My freshman year of college at Carnegie Mellon, I was in a program called University Choice where you got to take a special lecture series. My group was assigned to Hans Moravec. I had never heard of him or anything about him. He would talk to us about his ideas, about the future of humanity, and the possibility of downloading people's minds into machines. We toured his robotics labs, and just sat around for hours and shot the shit with him about anything and everything. He's kind of a renaissance man in a sense, the topics would range all over the place, and he was always well informed about anything that came up.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience, and I really agreed with damn near everything he had to say. Every once in a while, before I graduated, I would be walking across campus alone at night and run into him, and we'd stand and talk awhile, and it was always enjoyable. He was one of the cooler people I had met while at CMU.

Then later on, I started seeing him mentioned in nearly every copy of Wired, and in the "thanks" sections of science fiction books, or offhandedly in even comic books. About half the references you see refer to him as some sort of crazy nutjob, and refer to his ideas as "robots taking over the world", while the other half refer to him as a visionary who has been talking pretty accurately about the advances of science and AI for a long, long time.

Anyway, I just saw another reference today, and I got the usual little jolt of oddness. If you've not read any of his stuff, I'd recommend picking up Mind Children, or his more recent one, Robot. It's fascinating stuff, very practical and realistic projections of the next couple decades of robotic development, and covers ideas such as how to realistically put your mind in a machine, and the rise of superintelligent robotic beings.