Quotes About Mechanization

Now our world is at the present time firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head - if you want to call it that - is the World Engineer's Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make with our credit numbers, every time we use the public transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to live.

You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles.

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.

if we lose our human values by having everything mechanied, then machines will dictate our lives.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle it smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. but it has one defect: it needs a driver.

Machines were devised not to do a man out of a job, but to take the heavy labor from man's back and place it on the broad back of the machine.

Im a machine man, and I head a machine.

Der Zauber geht aufs bloße Tun, aufs Mittel über, kurz, auf die Industrie. Die Formalisierung der Vernunft ist bloß der intellektuelle Ausdruck der maschinellen Produktionsweise. Das Mittel wird fetischisiert: es absorbiert die Lust.

The hard work of the future will be pushing buttons

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

Couldn't they invent something automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job making the new invention?

In the past, war was confined for the most part to men in uniform, but with increased mechanization of armies and the introduction of air forces, there is an increased dependence on the home country, and eight to ten people working at home are now required to keep one man in the fighting line.

In 1854 I took out a patent for puddling iron by means of steam.

the definition of a machine is simple. It is anything that reduces human effort. Anything.

Machinery makes men like itself.

Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.

I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization...Certain farms contain hospitably the remnants and reminders of the forest or prairie that preceded them. It is possible even for towns and cities to remember farms and forests or prairies. All good human work remembers its history.

Czech noun related to the German noun Arbeit and meaning 'forced labour', to signify a new type of 'artificial' being, assembled like a car and programmed to be of service to humans.14 This choice of word was inspired by a conversation with his brother Josef, a painter of the cubist school. It would become an emblem of the future's potential. The

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.