On Machines IX (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it." (John Wyndham, "The Lost Machine", 1932)

"There are so many disadvantages in human construction which do not occur in us machines. [...] Some little thing here or there breaks - they stop working and then, in a short time, they are decomposing. Had he been a machine, like myself, I could have mended him, replaced the broken parts and made him as good as new, but with these animal structures one is almost helpless." (John Wyndham, "The Lost Machine", 1932)

"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) 

"There’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the mind that created them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them." (Catherine L Moore, "No Woman Born", 1944)

"The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"Too darned good a machine can be a menace, not a help." (John W Campbell Jr, "Cloak of Aesir", 1951)

"When your life has depended for a long while upon machines—upon tubes and wires and gadgets of all kinds - you must come to trust these things as a part of yourself." (Michael Shaara, "The Holes", 1954)

"If a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?" (Brian W Aldiss, "Who Can Replace a Man?", 1958)

"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets." (William S Burroughs, "Naked Lunch", 1959)

"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"The machines didn’t tire and the medi-techs never made computational errors but both lacked an essential something. Something only one human being, no matter how inadequate, could give to another." (Leo P Kelley, "The Handyman", 1965)

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"These machines had become old and worn-out, had begun making mistakes; therefore they began to seem almost human." (Philip K Dick & Ray Nelson, "The Ganymede Takeover", 1967)

"A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly." (Philip K Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", 1968)

"Someday, the real masters of space would be machines, not men - and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness - the first immortal midway between two orders of creation.

He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new - between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them.

Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead." (Arthur C Clarke, "A Meeting with Medusa", 1971)

"Man has reached the stage where he evolves through his machines." (Gene Wolfe, "Alien Stones", 1972)

"There was no easy way to heaven, or nirvana, or whatever it was that the faithful sought. Merit was acquired solely by one’s own efforts, not with the aid of machines. An interesting doctrine, and one containing much truth; but there were also times when only machines could do the job." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)

"The dreams of people are in the machines, a planet network of active imaginations hooked into their made-up, make-believe worlds. Artificial reality is taking over; it has its own children." (Storm Constantine, "Immaculate", 1991)

"Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith." (Peter Watts, "Blindsight", 2006)

"The architecture - the mind - is knitting together. It’s sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know something, while the secret is to create machines that don’t know something." (Scott Hutchins,  "A Working Theory of Love", 2012)

"Artificial intelligence is a concept that obscures accountability. Our problem is not machines acting like humans - it's humans acting like machines." (John Twelve Hawks, "Spark", 2014)