Quotes About Machines

In the end, Adams believes, we "may come to regard tactical warfare as properly the business of machines and not appropriate for people at all."7

We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road.

America was a land of machines, and it was through machines, the miraculous handmaidens of mob culture, that the muses of illiteracy brought America her voice and vision during the years of the immigrants' waves. Centuries ago, movable type had given literacy to the common man. Now, through these wondrous newer machines, he would give it back.

Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machines or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.

I believe that Ashby's brilliant idea of the unpurposeful random mechanism which seeks for its own purpose through a process of learning is not only one of the great philosophical contributions of the present day, but will lead to highly useful technical developments in the task of automatization. Not only can we build purpose into machines, but in an overwhelming majority of cases a machine designed to avoid certain pitfalls of breakdown will look for purposes which it can fulfill.

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

Nevertheless, in constructing machines, it is often very important for us to extend to them certain human attributes which are not found among the lower members of the animal community. If the reader wishes to conceive this as a metaphoric extension of our human personalities, he is welcome to do so; but he should be cautioned that the new machines will not stop working as soon as we have stopped giving them human support.

There's also a stony precipice nearby, but anyone who thinks it's a natural feature would be mistaken, for it's the remains of an old quarry, which used to take bites out of the Plateau and would surely have consumed the whole thing eventually in the avid mouths of its diggers. They say there are plans to start it up again, at which point we shall vanish from the face of the Earth, devoured by Machines.

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?

Jim Dunnigan, as we will see, calls them paper time machines.)

What do they be teaching the young these days? I declare, they think more on machines and formulas than they do on the true knowledge of the world. They blow things up, and calls it progress. They kills one another by the million, and calls it civilization.

Machines served life, it could not be otherwise.