Quotes About Machines

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting.

They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Living bodies are machines programmed by genes that have survived.

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Natural selection favours genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.

the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes.

Whatever the philosophical problems raised by consciousness, for the purpose of this story it can be thought of as the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes. [The Selfish Gene]

While the problem of ai can be viewed as, "Which of all the things humans do can machines also do?," I would prefer to ask the question in another form: "Of all of life's burdens, which are those machines can relieve, or significantly ease, for us?

The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.

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.

Many, who should know better, think that wars can be decided by soulless machines, rather than by the blood and anguish of brave men.

It is never the machines that are dead. It is only the mechanically-minded men that are dead.

A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

There is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.

The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.

For every three machines, you lose two jobs out of the surrounding economy because people are dumping their money on gambling

It is tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform experiments whose results we can not predict.

How far must suffering and misery go before we see that even in the day of vast cities and powerful machines, the good earth is our mother and that if we destroy her, we destroy ourselves?

We have always been thinking about different ways to perform electronic music, i.e. music made with machines.

How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.