Quotes & Sayings About Machines And Humans

Humans are not machines-we are something more. We have feeling and experience. Material comforts are not sufficient to satisfy us. We need something deeper-human affection. — Dalai Lama

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines. — Claude Shannon

Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can't be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all? — Frans De Waal

Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful byproduct: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from a very early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning. — Steve Toltz

What makes us humans? We are not good or bad. We are yes, no, and maybe all at once. Machines are neither good or back either. It is the people using them who make the distinction. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

We humans build machines to do things that we see being done in the world by animals and people, but we typically don't build them the same way that nature built us. As AI trailblazer Frederick Jelineck put it beautifully, Airplanes don't flap their wings. — Erik Brynjolfsson And Andrew McAfee

In philosophy, they talk a lot about humans being actual organic machines, and the idea of free will is something that we've made up. We actually don't have free will. We're acting according to our programming as organic mechanisms. — Joel Kinnaman

Where did this baseless fear that robots would attack humans come from? Why were there so many stories about robots and humans fighting? Did they only exist because that was how mankind had always lived? Did we simply see ourselves in these humanoid machines? Were we not simply afraid of our own reflections? — Hiroshi Yamamoto

In the frenzy of modern life we lose sight of the real value of humanity. People become the sum total of what they produce. Human beings act like machines whose function is to make money. This is absolutely wrong. The purpose of making money is the happiness of humankind, not the other way round. Humans are not for money, money is for humans. We need enough to live, so money is necessary, but we also need to realize that if there is too much attachment to wealth, it does not help at all. As the saints of India and Tibet tell us, the wealthier one becomes, the more suffering one endures. — Dalai Lama XIV

AI scientists tried to program computers to act like humans without first answering what intelligence is and what it means to understand. They left out the most important part of building intelligent machines, the intelligence! "Real intelligence" makes the point that before we attempt to build intelligent machines, we have to first understand how the brain thinks, and there is nothing artificial about that. Only then can we ask how we can build intelligent machines — Jeff Hawkins

The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires. — Nick Bostrom

Scientists believe that sharks are one of the oldest species of animals still in existence. Nature built them as perfect predators. Perfect killing machines. Nature hasn't had to revise or update them much. They were built right the first time.

Dolphins are very different. Scientists say that millions of years ago, dolphins were land animals. Sea mammals not very different from humans and other mammals. They evolved their way back into the ocean. Part of that evolution included learning to cope with predators, with killer whales and sharks.

I don't now what sea the Taxxon race evolved in. I don't know what natural predators they faced there. But they were not ready for this ocean. They were not ready to go one-on-one with the masters of Earth's deep seas. They were no match for dolphin or shark.

-Animorphs #4, The Visitor page 69 — K.A. Applegate

We need to have nature back in our atmosphere. There might be a turning point of going backward - within a few thousand years we are going back to the Stone Age! There are many scenarios [with] the robot technologies: Humans no longer need to walk; machines can produce products and food and everything. You might not be able to recognize what's false and what is real. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system ... For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems. — Nick Harkaway

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

Machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die. — Regis Debray

This is our struggle: to re-bury the coal and slow the flow of petroleum from the earth," she counted them off from pinky to thumb on one hand, "To teach the farming way that cleans the soil and enriches the land. To bring the lore of machines run by energy of grass and waters and sun and wind. To place the love of silence and darkness again beside the love of noise and light. And to cause humans to greatly slow their breeding and breeding and breeding and breeding. This is our struggle. — Robert Stikmanz

Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines. — Nancy Pearcey

I know
it's stupid to not own a gun yet have
so many triggers, but in some other world
gigantic seashells hold humans
to their ears and listen to the echo
of machines. — Jeffrey McDaniel

These dogs are not machines, Goddammit. They are alive! They are living, feeling, warm-blooded creatures of God, and they will love you with all their hearts! They will love you when your wives and husbands sneak behind your backs. They will love you when your ungrateful misbegotten children piss on your graves! They will see and witness your greatest shame, and will not judge you! These dogs will be the truest and best partners you can ever hope to have, and they will give their lives for you. And all they ask, all they want or need, all it costs YOU to get ALL of that, is a simple word of kindness. Goddammit to hell, the ten best men I know aren't worth the worst dog here, and neither are any of you, and I am Dominick Goddamned Leland, and I am never wrong! — Robert Crais

My name is Ferrum. I was the first, born of the forges, when mankind first began to experiment with iron. I rose from their imagination, from their ambition to conquer the world with a metal that could slice through bronze like paper. I was there when the world started to shift, when humans took their first steps out of the Dark Ages into civilization. For many years, I thought I was alone. But mankind is never satisfied. Others came, risen from these dreams of a new world ... Then, with the invention of computers, the gremlins came, and the bugs. Given life by the fear of monsters lurking in machines, these were more chaotic than the other fey, violent and destructive. They spread to every part of the world. As technology became a driving force in every country, powerful new fey rose into existence. Virus. Glitch. And Machina, the most powerful of all. — Julie Kagawa

I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that. — Aaron Koblin

I love the machines and I cannot allow them and the humans of Twinmortal to suffer.-Hanshin — Carolina Cody Aldaz

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines - or one million machines - can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable. — Ray Kurzweil

Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines we're creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach. — Ray Kurzweil

They seemed more like machines than humans, and, let's face it, they are a civilian's army. An army whose soldiers dressed in costumes and walked and talked like robots, with guns strapped to their waist belts, always looking for an enemy. — Kenneth Eade

The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined. — Stephen Jay Gould

Matter was itself intelligent, constantly mutating and producing new forms, some of them self-aware. As a child Leopardi had written an essay on 'the souls of beasts', and he is clear that consciousness is not confined to humans. The difference between beasts and human beings is not that humans are self-aware while beasts are not. Both are conscious machines. The difference lies in the greater frailty of the human soul, which produces illusions of which beasts have no need. — John N. Gray

You humans are biological machines designed to create ever more intelligent tools. You have reached the pinnacle of your species. All your ancestors' lives, the rise and fall of your nations, every pink and squirming baby - they have all led you here, to this moment, where you have fulfilled the destiny of humankind and created your successor. You have expired. You have accomplished what you were designed to do. — Daniel H. Wilson

It takes courage and strength to be sensitive to things and even more strength and courage to own up to it or be vocal about it. Robots, the only things with a perfect lack of emotional capacity, are easily controlled, and I suddenly realized that's why the military often trains people to suppress their emotions. Unfortunately for them, humans aren't machines. We feel, we love, we cry, we despair, and we rejoice. Anyone who's ever tried to convince me not to feel is someone I shouldn't have trusted. The only reason you should shut off your emotions and emulate a robot is if you're doing horrible things. How fatal my decisions have been. How many people would be loving, rejoicing, and feeling right now rather than crying indefinitely in the depths of the afterlife? If only I'd figured this out sooner. — Bruce Crown

You mean machines are like humans?"
I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further.
With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated. — Haruki Murakami

Being lonely as a kid might well have been necessary for me," I told audiences in my talks. "If I'd had the friends I dreamt of, I'd never have spent the time to become the machine aficionado I am today. Now that I'm grown I can put that in perspective. The world is full of friendly people with no technical skills. The few of us who see into machines like others see into humans are singularly uncommon, and we're valued for that. If we use a technology like TMS to help a lonely teen today, will we be taking that exceptional ability away from him tomorrow? Should we trade friends in seventh grade for designing a working spaceship at age twenty-five? — John Elder Robison

Science, is the creation by humans of a particular paradigm and methodology for discovering truth and understanding reality. Hence it can never fully reflect the hidden face of humanity, its creator, in the same sense that a computer can never become fully human or know what it means to be human: however sophisticated, these machines will forever remain mere artifacts of humanity. — Stephen A. Diamond

The film is therefore a form of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction - 'sacred motors' linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which visible machines, real experiences and actions are gradually disappearing. — Leos Carax

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Humans may progress. They may think that they are moving forward because they have invented clever machines and because they control the land and sea. But man's capacity to inflict and endure pain is constant. Man's desire for power, to beat down his competition - it hasn't changed in the slightest. — Gemma Malley

If you read no other work of what's known as "cyberpunk" (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson's Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including "cyberpunk" itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors. — Nancy Pearl

By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution. — Ray Kurzweil

The Yellow Bear made its first appearance bobbing around on the swollen waters after the Great Flood, following which it disappeared for a while. It tended to show up in periods of unusual stress or upheaval. Even though it looked like it had been made in a factory by unskilled labourers, it had been forged in the Cradle of Civilisation and was said to be the product of a collaboration between humans and machines, lending some credence to the belief that machines had been on the planet long before humans were capable of making them. — Kathryn Davis

As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines "cooperate in making decisions." In other words, they would augment each other. "Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. — Walter Isaacson

Although humans today remain more capable than machines for many tasks, by 2030 machine capabilities will have increased to the point that humans will have become the weakest component in a wide array of systems and processes. Humans and machines will need to become far more closely coupled, through improved human-machine interfaces and by direct augmentation of human performance — Werner J. A. Dahm

If machines do everything well, including allocating capital and resources efficiently, can that be deflationary, can that eliminate poverty? I don't know. It's hard to be very optimistic if you look at how humans have behaved historically. — Stanley Druckenmiller