On Machines VI (Man vs Machine)

"The human body is a machine which winds its own springs." (Julien Offray de La Mettrie, "Man a Machine", 1747)

"A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. He that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well being of mankind." (Henry W Beecher, "Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit", 1887) 

"We have reason not to be afraid of the machine, for there is always constructive change, the enemy of machines, making them change to fit new conditions." (Charles F Kettering, "Quotation Marks: Against Technocracy", [New York Times] 1933)

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

"Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine." (Frank L Wright, "Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894-1940", 1941)

"Man such as we know him, is a machine." (George I Gurdjieff, "Search of the Miraculous", 1949)

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human." (Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" , Mind Vol. 59, 1950)

"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do." (Burrhus F Skinner, "Contingencies of Reinforcement", 1969)

"Without mankind machines are nothing." (Edmund Cooper, "The Overman Culture", 1971) 

"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment." (Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", 1976)

"We will learn that computers, amazing as they are, still cannot come close to being as effective as human beings. A computer isn't creative on its own because it is programmed to behave in a predictable way. Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that." (Masaru Ibuka, The Corporate Board Vol. 13, 1992)

"You can predict exactly what a machine will do if you have sufficient knowledge of it. A machine cannot go beyond the limitations of its design. The man-machine fears death because a machine cannot see beyond its own destruction." (Barry Long, "Knowing Yourself: The True in the False", 1996)