Quotes About Automation

One would expect that a surge of new automation opportunities in highly paid work would catalyze a surge of corporate investment in computer hardware and software. Instead, the opposite occurred.

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world which seems to be accelerating around them.

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 ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your believing for you'. The de luxe model is advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City'.

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?

I am a machine condemned to devour books.

Just tick a few boxes, agree to the terms and conditions and wait for the automated reply that says it's all gone through and we're now husband and wife. Why has that not been set up?

Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough.

Machines can only find what ignorant men have programmed them to find.

Machinery makes men like itself.

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.

Technology is not about tools, it deals with how Man works.

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.

No technique is possible when men are free. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.

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

But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.

I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.