Quotes About Machines

In the end I came to see that the true prophet of the modern world was Samuel Butler: when he suggested that the machine was an evolutionary development, destined to supersede man as the dominant species and reduce him to greenfly status, the status of machine-minder, homo mechanicus instead of homo sapiens ; and to modify his nature accordingly.

Actually, typefaces and racing bikes are very much alike. Both are ideas as well as machines, and neither should be burdened with excess drag or baggage. Pictures of pumping feet will not make the type go faster, any more than smoke trails, pictures of rocket ships or imitation lightning bolts tied to the frame will improve the speed of the bike.

The folks who think that code will one day disappear are like mathematicians who hope one day to discover a mathematics that does not have to be formal. They are hoping that one day we will discover a way to create machines that can do what we want rather than what we say. These machines will have to be able to understand us so well that they can translate vaguely specified needs into perfectly executing programs that precisely meet those needs. This will never happen.

Software is a compound word. The word "ware" means "product." The word "soft" means easy to change. Therefore, software is a product that is easy to change. Software was invented because we wanted a way to quickly and easily change the behavior of our machines. Had we wanted that behavior to be hard to change, we would have called it hardware.

The first value of software is its behavior. Programmers are hired to make machines behave in a way that makes or saves money for the stakeholders. We do this by helping the stakeholders develop a functional specification, or requirements document. Then we write the code that causes the stakeholder's machines to satisfy those requirements.

He was a modernizer, in other words, who never forgot the importance of the individual people behind the machines. His

He learned. The machines taught on deep, unconscious levels. The machines intertwined their lessons with the basic drives, weaving a pattern of learned behavior with the life instinct. They taught, then blocked off conscious knowledge of the lessons, sealed it—and fused it. What had he been taught? For the social good, you must be your own policeman and witness. You must assume responsibility for any crime which might conceivably be yours.

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.

[I] grew up as a disciple of science. I know its fascination. I have felt the godlike power man derives from his machines.

A journey inward may end in defeatFor life as we know it was made by machines

How typical of a machine to think it knows better.

The convenient function of every celebrated machine for living is to produce machines to live in them.

I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than where they put your heart. Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can't find it with all their machines and microcameras.

gran incremento en la labor que un mismo número de personas puede realizar como consecuencia de la división del trabajo se debe a tres circunstancias diferentes; primero, al aumento en la destreza de todo trabajador individual; segundo, al ahorro del tiempo que normalmente se pierde al pasar de un tipo de tarea a otro; y tercero, a la invención de un gran número de máquinas que facilitan y abrevian la labor, y permiten que un hombre haga el trabajo

Because the software-creation process is out of control, the high-tech industry must bring its process to heel, or else it will continue to put the blame on ordinary users while ever-bigger machines sit dead in the water.

Death is, and must be, deeply emotional. To intentionally cause death is to engender a form of intimacy, one that we're not used to thinking about. To kill without emotion and without respect, or to ignore the intimacy inherent in the act, is to rob it of its dignity, and to rob the life that you are ending of its significance. By robbing death and life of significance we reduce ourselves to the machines Descartes dreamed about. And we deny our own significance.

It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations.

Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

Technology has a shadow side. It accounts for real progress in medicine, but has also hurt it in many ways, making it more impersonal, expensive and dangerous. The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us, permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices, has undermined our spirit of self-reliance.

The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don't.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

The planet's spinning a thousand miles an hour around this gigantic nuclear explosion while these people roll these machines with rubber tires over this hard surface that we've laid down over the planet so that we can easily move ourselves back and forth.