Quotes About Machines

He was a wizard of sorts, a magus and a grammaticus; and continually communing with his machines as he did, he seemed to find talking to actual people a confusion to him.

An experimental physics lab is probably unlike any other room you've been in before. The lighting is harsh, of course, aggressively bright and beyond the reach of aesthetic concerns. There are sounds of machines, a harmonic hum, sometimes just from fans on computer equipment as opposed to any motorized parts. There's never any bespoke sound absorbers, so the machines have a sonic clarity that seems intentional, cranked up for some postindustrial experimental orchestra.

We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.

pulped books. That was intended to explain the screaming. Machines

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.

They talked for a time longer and Sine took him on a brief tour of the plant, past assembly lines where dungareed girls operating wire-wrap machines worked on computer circuits, the company's major product.

There were whole habitats where people had had their higher brain functions disengaged, so that they could live like sheep under the care of machines

Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money.

Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from £1,600 to more than £20,000.

I build computers.

I started working at a point in history when digital computers were becoming mature, and before that, there were no such machines.

I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

I love the immediacy of those old analog machines; it's really inspiring. You just set them up to play, and they go, playing the same thing until you switch the pattern.

Science is not the result of dispassionate machines spitting out Truth; it involves passionate humans pursuing truth and fame and next week's paycheck, while satisfying curiosity at the same time.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

The British custom of taking tea as an afternoon break has more to do with sugar than with tea. During the nineteenth century, when the custom arose, it was something like the coffee break in modern workplaces, but not so leisurely: a chance to gulp a quick cup of tea, which was invariably laced with sugar. In this way were the human machines of the factory "nourished"—fueled—without even needing to leave their machines.

Engineers today design efficient machines scaled to meet most human needs, from microchips to passenger jets. In earlier eras, animals were bred to such purposes: sheep for mutton and sheep for wool; cattle for meat, cattle for milk, and oxen for hauling; dogs to a thousand purposes

Nothing lasts forever, not even the best machines. And everything can be reused. - Hephaestus

It isn't easy being a brilliant inventor, always alone. Always misunderstood. Easy to turn bitter, make horrible mistakes. People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed. -Hephaestus

designing a secret passage, where would I put it? He could sometimes figure out how a machine worked by putting his hand on it. He'd learned to fly a helicopter that way. He'd fixed Festus the dragon that way (before Festus crashed and burned). Once he'd even reprogrammed the electronic billboards in Times Square to read: ALL DA LADIES LUV LEO…accidentally, of course.

People today work as hard, if not harder, than they did thirty years ago. The only difference is the quality of the work they perform. They no longer accomplish anything of value. They only service the machines.

our minds are the machines we must dismantle and rebuild in order to grasp the infinite.

What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.