Monday, July 13, 2009

Emancipation of Machines


Man has successfully created things that help ease the burden of him having to work with the exertion of effort. He has successfully created things that can destroy his own kind and his planet. Why can’t he create something that would successfully end world hunger and war?

~ Jfaypon

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

~Albert Einstein


If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. ~Frank Lloyd Wright

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. ~Jean Arp

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. ~Aldous Huxley

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours. ~John F. Kennedy

This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it. ~Jonas Salk

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. ~Karl Marx

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us. ~John Kenneth Galbraith

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them. ~Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. ~R. Buckminster Fuller

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men. ~Havelock Ellis

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers. ~Walter Lippmann

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ~Carl Sagan

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. ~Sydney J. Harris

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