Quotes About Machines

Using machines to make other machines allowed finer tolerances to be maintained-sometimes down to a thousandth of an inch-and this in turn meant that parts could be made interchangeable.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

Let's begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we've been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master.

other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs." In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.

Goldratt taught us that in most plants, there are a very small number of resources, whether it's men, machines, or materials, that dictates the output of the entire system. We call this the constraint—or bottleneck. Either

When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records. -- Vina, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), Star Trek, 1966

In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates. —Alan Turing, 1950

the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.

The transition to virtual machines (optimizing the allocation of processing cycles) and to cloud computing (optimizing storage allocation) marks the beginning of a transformation into a landscape where otherwise wasted resources are being put to use.

actual brains, which turn out be much more like sensory processors than logic machines.

La Roumanie est en guerre avec le capitalisme, intervint CeauÈ™escu. (Il bégaie toujours légèrement lorsqu'il aborde un sujet important ou lorsqu'il est en colère.) N-nous ne p-pouvons pas vaincre avec les m-machines à l-laver. C-ce sont des d-dollars qui n-nous faut pour p-protéger la l-liberté de n-notre peuple. Et n-nous gagnerons plus de d-dollars en vendant des armes que des appareils m-ménagers. (p. 40)

Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.

In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile

The machines do not solve problems with greater insight than men do, only faster. Only faster!

All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on "calculating machines" had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain. She

What man does for his own desires and comforts affects the complex total-of-life, the ecology, and his short-term gains can bring long-term disadvantages. The Machines taught us to set up a human society which would minimize that, but the near-disaster of the early Twenty-first Century has left mankind suspicious of innovations.

There can be no serious conflicts on Earth, in which one group or another can seize more power than it has for what it thinks is its own good despite the harm to Mankind as a whole, while the Machines rule.

Mankind's future] was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand—at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society,—having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at their disposal, the absolute control of our economy.

Los robots eran máquinas y no metáforas.

You see, Peter, machines can't fall in love, but--even when it's hopeless and horrifying--women can!

the question of ownership of the means of production becomes obsolescent. Whoever owned them (if such a phrase has meaning), a man, a group, a nation, or all mankind, they could be utilized only as the Machines directed.

When I was on 'Terra Nova', I had an Australian iPhone and a U.S. iPhone, different time zones, just a couple differences in the machines, but I was able to keep the international aspect of things in order. But I lost my U.S. iPhone right before I left Australia. Somebody's got it somewhere out there. Send it back?

The trains that travel the Chunnel are massive machines. The Eurostars are bullet-shaped and a quarter-mile long. They are pulled by a 136,000-pound locomotive and move in the open air at 185 m.p.h. and through the tunnel at 100 m.p.h.