Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hans Peter Moravec, born on the 30th of November 1948, is an Austrian-born Canadian computer scientist and adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, the neural substitution argument about consciousness, and futurist predictions about superintelligence.
In a 1998 paper, Moravec predicted that computers suitable for humanlike robots would appear in the 2020s. He based this on estimating the computational cost of human brain operations and projecting that, if Moore's law continued, a computer of equivalent speed would cost only 1,000 US dollars (in 1997 terms) by the mid-2020s.
The neural substitution argument, outlined by Moravec in his 1988 book Mind Children, holds that if each neuron in a conscious brain is replaced successively by an electronic substitute with identical behavior, biological consciousness would transfer seamlessly into an electronic computer. The argument concludes that consciousness does not depend on biology and can be treated as an abstract, computable process.
The "mind fire" concept appears in Moravec's 1999 book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, describing a coming period of rapidly expanding superintelligence. Moravec arrived at this prediction by generalising Moore's law to technologies predating the integrated circuit and extrapolating the trend forward.
Moravec co-founded Seegrid Corporation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2003. The company's goals included developing a fully autonomous robot capable of navigating its environment without human intervention.
Arthur C. Clarke called Robot "the most awesome work of controlled imagination I have ever encountered" and said Moravec stretched his mind "until it hit the stops." By contrast, philosopher Colin McGinn, writing for The New York Times, described Moravec's ideas about consciousness as "bizarre, confused, incomprehensible" and said his speculations "spiral majestically into incoherence."