Quotes About Machines

Can man-made machines learn and can they reproduce themselves? We shall try to show in this chapter that in fact they can learn and can reproduce themselves, and we shall give an account of the technique needed for both these activities.

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.

older movie they'd seen many times about a guy who finds out his life is not really a life, but some sort of computer-generated virtual reality, and he has to save the world from the tyranny of the machines.

There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts. Then what is to be done?

To make more machines for more people to struggle and buy, to catch up with the great mad procession of the world struggling to get all out of life that was in it --Ah! Why would they not see? Why must so many be blind?

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

Ford's opinion that cows were the crudest, most inefficient machines in the world is not unjustified considering the amount of land and energy it takes to keep one alive. Between 2000 and 2005, cattle ranching accounted for 60 percent of deforestation, and today Brazil is the world's largest exporter of cows, with its 180,000,000-head herd equaling the size of its population.

The field of Western medicine has seemingly become literally nothing but medicine. Are doctors are on their way out, to be replaced by self-service pharmaceutical vending machines?

Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

If it was going to be unique, if you're going to make a robot movie in 2011... it had to be different, and it had to be about more than its machines and more than its action.

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

The machines, the modern mode of production, slowly undermined domestic production and not just for thousands but for millions of women the question arose: Where do we now find our livelihood?

Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

The big AI dreams of making machines that could someday evolve to do intelligent things like humans could - I was turned off by that. I didn't really think that was feasible when I first joined Stanford.

Customers are the reason we open our doors every day, and keep the machines humming all night long. Customers determine what we eat, where we live, whether we stay in business.

For every step forward in electronic communications, we've taken two steps back in humanity. People know how to use a computer and answering machines but have forgotten how to connect with one another. Our society is unraveling. We're too self-obsessed.

Man has made some machines that can answer questions provided the facts are profusely stored in them, but we will never be able to make a machine that will ask questions. The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer.

She was in the zone, a human copressor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart.

Computers can control you or they can lighten your work—if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.