quotations about machines
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.
SAMUEL BUTLER
letter to the Editor of the Press, "Darwin among the Machines", June 13, 1863
To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Machinery makes men like itself.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Inspired Millionaires
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
SAINT-EXUPERY
Wind, Sand, and Stars
All his life he'd been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn't spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.
MICHEL FABER
The Book of Strange New Things
I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest.
CHUANG TZU
The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
A machine, receiving at distant times and from many hands new combinations and improvements, and becoming at last of signal benefit to mankind, may be compared to a rivulet, swelled in its course by tributary streams until it rolls along a majestic river, enriching in its progress provinces and kingdoms.
ROBERT STUART
Historical and descriptive anecdotes of steam-engines, and of their inventors and improvers
The machine itself ... is a human product, and its very abstractions make it more definitely human in one sense than those human arts which on occasion realistically counterfit nature.
LEWIS MUMFORD
Technics and Civilization
Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish.
JOHN STUART MILL
Principles of Political Economy
Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
ELLEN GOODMAN
"The Human Factor", The Washington Post, January 1987
There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware, self-improving machines will evolve beyond humans' ability to control or even understand them.
RAY KURZWEIL
Scientific American, June 2010
When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it -- whether it be a factory or a government.
ALEXANDER CHASE
Perspectives
Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
The machine is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression of our desires: it is merely a series of instruments, which we will use in so far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail where they infringe upon it or exist purely to support the adventitious structure of capitalism.
LEWIS MUMFORD
Technics and Civilization
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
STEPHEN HAWKING
"Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots", Huffington Post, October 8, 2015
Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Behind the virtual worlds of the Internet, machines are still with us, often hidden behind shiny plastic and chrome or under the basement, closeted, silent and sentinel.
FRANCIS C. MOON
introduction, The Machines of Leonardo Da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux