Human Machines Quotes

#1. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.

H.G.Wells

#2. In today's world, human beings are dying and human machines are taking birth.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#3. I hope people see us not just as a football player, but also as human beings, we are not machines!

Marco Reus

#4. It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.

Saul Bellow

#5. Of all machines, the human heart is the most complicated and inexplicable.

Thomas Jefferson

#6. There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.

Bertrand Russell

#7. Vonnegut's earliest novels hint strongly at his familiarity with Wiener's work, The Human Use of Human Beings, especially his first novel, Player Piano (1952), which shows his concern for the social implications of automation, the replacement of human beings with machines.

David Porush

#8. The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.

Niall Ferguson

#9. All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on "calculating machines" had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain. She

Isaac Asimov

#10. The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it.

Winston Churchill

#11. The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.

Sarah Connor

#12. a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can't keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines.

John Brunner

#13. The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own.

Richard Bach

#14. Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

Freeman Dyson

#15. Even in the latter case nature exhibits a kind of intelligence, and there is no reason to rule out the possibility that machines will do so too. If nature in the form of the human species could bring forth intelligent machines, the process of evolution would continue among the machines.

John N. Gray

#16. The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.

Amadeo Bordiga

#17. People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

George Orwell

#18. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. ... It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.

Chris Hedges

#19. Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.

Marvin Olasky

#20. Never send a human to do a machine's job

Hugo Weaving

#21. Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.

Iris Murdoch

#22. I demand the best. Sleep is forbidden. If you work for me, you have to roll how I roll. Im not really human. Im like a machine.

Puff Daddy

#23. If human beings are losing every time, it doesn't matter whether they're losing to a conscious machine or an completely non conscious machine, they still lost. The singularity is about the quality of decision-making, which is not consciousness at all.

Stuart J. Russell

#24. If we're going to achieve compassion in the machines and also feel safe with the machines, to raise machines with human-like values, we need to make them human-like by simulating, or perhaps eventually imitating, human beings in high accuracy from top to bottom.

David Hanson

#25. Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice.

Louis MacNeice

#26. Smell is the closest thing human beings have to a time machine.

Caryl Rivers

#27. The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.

Iain M. Banks

#28. Machines are non living things, but they still can absorb human attitudes.

Sukant Ratnakar

#29. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.

Mark Weiser

#30. When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

Richard Dawkins

#31. Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me the choice is easy.

Michael Scott

#32. You cannot love a car the way you love a horse. The horse brings out human feelings the way machines cannot do. Things like machines may develop or neglect certain things in people ... Machines make our life impersonal and stultify certain elements in us and create an impersonal environment.

Albert Einstein

#33. Good human qualities-honesty, sincerity, a good heart-cannot be bought with money, nor can they be produced my machines, but only by the mind itself. We can call this the inner light, or God's blessing, or human qualitity. This is the essence of mankind.

Dalai Lama

#34. How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we many even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.

Viktor E. Frankl

#35. All about a human being is, it's a great big hoping machine.

Woody Guthrie

#36. The sooner the world solves its economic problems, the sooner its inhabitants can afford leisure and peace and get on with the non-material things that are inherently important: the work of mind and spirit that is gloriously and uniquely human, the work that no machine can ever do.

Louis O. Kelso

#37. I have no skills with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill me if they can.

Robertson Davies

#38. Something in us is telling us we're moving too fast, at a pace dictated by machines rather than by anything human, and that unless we take conscious measures, we'll permanently be out of breath.

Pico Iyer

#39. In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.

C.S. Lewis

#40. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

J.B. Priestley

#41. Like the whole range of other human emotions, it's just a matter of chemistry. We are all nothing but machines made of flesh.

Donato Carrisi

#42. The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.

Ted Turner

#43. I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

Sebastiao Salgado

#44. Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

Michael Shermer

#45. Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it's great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001.

Jacques Rivette

#46. Normal is a cycle on the washing machine. There is no such thing when it comes to human beings.

Trisha Goddard

#47. Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.

Paul McEuen

#48. While human space travel is daunting, machines - with their indefinitely long lifetimes - could travel the galaxy. It might make little difference to them that bridging the distance from one star to the next could take hundreds of thousands of years or more.

Seth Shostak

#49. The human beings who appear in the data, survivors or not, are grouped under one machine designated classification:
Hero.
These damn machines knew us and loved us, even while they were tearing our civilization to shreds.

Daniel H. Wilson

#50. Human beings are just way more complex than they'd like to be. They like to be simple machines. And they'll set up fantasy scenarios where they're simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret.

Nell Zink

#51. Compelling characters are not cogs in the machine of your plot; they are human beings to whom the story happens.

David Corbett

#52. Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC:The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

Stephen Hawking

#53. Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait

Blaise Cendrars

#54. For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.

Carol Ann Duffy

#55. What if you take a human mind, and upload it into one of these machines?

Gary Marcus

#56. Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

Ray Kurzweil

#57. There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.

Richard K. Morgan

#58. To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.

Brian Christian

#59. Why do you assume I'm human?
I wasn't born; I was created just like this.
First I was an idea.
Then I came into being, charged with a very important task.
I've come to find the monster.

Eliza Granville

#60. There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.

Martin Rees

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

Dalai Lama XIV

#62. There is this to be said for walking: it is the one method of human locomotion by which a man or woman proceeds erect, upright, proud and independent, not squatting on the haunches like a frog.
Little boys love machines. Grown-up mean and women like to walk.

Edward Abbey

#63. The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.

Edsger Dijkstra

#64. I see the human being is an incredible machine, totally undiscovered in many ways. Every one of us has a hidden tank of energy that comes out when it is needed.

Alex Zanardi

#65. Probability of human error is considerably higher than that of machine error.

Kenneth Appel

#66. Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.

Stanislav Grof

#67. It's occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.

Herman Wouk

#68. 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.

Alan Turing

#69. Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.

Kurt Godel

#70. It is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.

H.G.Wells

#71. But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.

Howard Zinn

#72. In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile

Isaac Asimov

#73. Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.

Simone De Beauvoir

#74. The machine does not teach playing flexibility, does not help in taking account of human facxtors in the battle, and on whole, strictly speaking, it restricts the possibilities for young players.

Sergei Shipov

#75. It's unlikely that machines would spontaneously decide they didn't like people, or that they had goals in opposition to those of human beings.

Stuart J. Russell

#76. A lot of people talk about sometime around 2030, machines will be more powerful than the human brain, in terms of the raw number of computations they can do per second. But that seems completely irrelevant. We don't know how the brain is organized, how it does what it does.

Stuart J. Russell

#77. What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

John Brunner

#78. The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

Kurt Vonnegut

#79. Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

Jeremy Rifkin

#80. Surely it's better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be.

William H Gass

#81. The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.

Woody Guthrie

#82. In order for capitalism to evolve from its current toxic expression, I propose the value of international currencies be tied to an Index of Human Productive Output. The emphasis being on human productivity not inanimate machines and virtual assets created by the mirage of the investment banker

Said Elias Dawlabani

#83. Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

George Orwell

#84. Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

Arthur Koestler

#85. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

J. C. R. Licklider

#86. Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer.

Garry Kasparov

#87. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.

C.S. Lewis

#88. What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

Jose Saramago

#89. There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

Mark Zuckerberg

#90. it offends the continuum of human dignity to treat people like the appendage of highly efficient machines.

Simon Head

#91. Flying in space is risky. It will never be safe, and the best thing we can do is manage those risks. It's important for people, for human beings, to be in space because they're adaptable and because they're not pre-programmed software that can go off and do tasks that are appropriate for machines.

Alan G. Poindexter

#92. There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.

Arthur Miller

#93. Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.

Karel Capek

#94. Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all.

Ralph Merkle

#95. The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

Peter Senge

#96. Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.

Bertrand Russell

#97. How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

#98. If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines.

Wilhelm Von Humboldt

#99. [Finishing schools] are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, "Into how little space a human being can be crushed?" I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move ...

Olive Schreiner

#100. Machines are on track to be on par with human intelligence in less than 15 years.

Judy Woodruff