Quotes About Automation

software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless "rituals" whose steps are "encoded in the logic of web pages."33

Automation weakens the bond between tool and user not because computer-controlled systems are complex but because they ask so little of us.

The generation effect requires precisely the kind of struggle that automation seeks to alleviate.

Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine. When

Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing.

The automation of wayfinding serves to "inhibit the process of experiencing the physical world by navigation through it." 4 As

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form.

Automation tends to turn us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit our ability to learn and to develop expertise.

We'll know that Google has truly fulfilled its vision when the Googleplex no longer needs toilets at all.

THE TROUBLE with automation is that it often gives us what we don't need at the cost of what we do.

When automation distances us from our work, when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.

information is a commodity that can be processed by a machine.

In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than "the sex organs of the machine world,

In programming the World Wide Computer, we will be programming our lives.

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

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

The man who invents a new machine invents for humanity a new concatenation of new forms of servitude.

Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?

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.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'

replacing brainpower is different from replacing muscle power. Good jobs that emerged from the decline of manufacturing and rise of services required brains, not brawn. "Knowledge worker" was the category that everyone wanted to join. But now we have lost our monopoly on knowledge. Artificial intelligence can handle desirable jobs better and faster than human brains can handle them. There will be jobs for people, but who will want them?

Everything changed for the machines.

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.