Machines And Nature Quotes & Sayings

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever. — Bertrand Russell

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

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace. — Kurt Vonnegut

Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create. — Bertrand Russell

The more I see of unmechanized places and people the more conviced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature. — Dervla Murphy

Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations. — Jeremy Campbell

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

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

We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature ... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle. — Max Frisch

Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them. — Herbert Read

There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality. — Arthur Miller

Nature, ... in order to carry out the marvelous operations [that occur] in animals and plants has been pleased to construct their organized bodies with a very large number of machines, which are of necessity made up of extremely minute parts so shaped and situated as to form a marvelous organ, the structure and composition of which are usually invisible to the naked eye without the aid of a microscope ... Just as Nature deserves praise and admiration for making machines so small, so too the physician who observes them to the best of his ability is worthy of praise, not blame, for he must also correct and repair these machines as well as he can every time they get out of order. — Marcello Malpighi

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

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

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

The more a person learns how to use the forces of nature for his own purposes, by means of perfecting the sciences and the invention and improvement of machines, the more he will produce. — Friedrich List

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

My feeling toward Republicans is like my feeling about sharks: of course they're stupid and vicious. It's in their nature to be mindless, ravening killing machines. It's nothing personal. They don't know any better. Pretty much the only thing you can do about them is stay out of their waters and, if you're unlucky enough to meet with one, shoot it through its rudimentary brain with a spear gun. — Tim Kreider

That is the nature of our beasts and plagues. They are not dumb machines to be driven about. They have their own needs and hungers. Their own evolutionary demands. They must mutate and adapt, and so you will never be done with me, and when I am gone, what will you do then? We have released demons upon the world, and your walls are only as good as my intellect. Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be? — Paolo Bacigalupi

I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. — Zhuangzi

Unfortunately, we-especially in the United States-have become increasingly mechanized, so that today we feel very strongly that if we can take anything out of human hands and especially out of the human heart and put it through a machine, we have made progress. Indeed, we flatter ourselves that we can make machines that think like human beings, while not always pausing to reflect that in the process we have also succeeded in making millions of human beings who can feel and think like machines. It is a sorry reflection. — Ashley Montagu

When we were told not to play with our foods, we got bad advice. When we were told to eat what was on our plate, that too was bad advice. Instead, we should play with our foods: experiment and pay attention to how different foods affect our energy levels, moods, and body. We are feeling machines. Our body continuously generates feeling information that signals our biological condition. When we ignore the biological signals generated inside our body regarding our needs, in order to heed social signals regarding foods from outside, we begin a process that removes our awareness from our own nature, leads to poor food habits, and gradually results in physical deterioration. — Udo Erasmus

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines. — Eric Hoffer

Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature's ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself. — Umberto Eco

The universe is an infinite opportunity creation machine. In every instant, the possibility of greater possibility is programmed into the nature of things. Love creates the conduit through which new possibility enters our experience, and lovelessness keeps it at bay. — Marianne Williamson

What is clearly happening inside this glass capsule is happening less clearly at a great scale on Earth in the closing years of this millennium. The realm of the born - all that is nature - and the realm of the made - all that is humanly constructed - are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered. That's banking on some ancient — Kevin Kelly

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. — Carl Jung

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

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

A knowledge of brain science will provide one of the major foundations of the new age to come. That knowledge will spawn cures for disease, new machines based on brain function, further insights into our nature and how we know. — Gerald Edelman

I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me. — Neal Stephenson

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use. — Wendell Berry

As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity. — Immanuel Kant

It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery method continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God. — Mahatma Gandhi

In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

To escape consumerism and conformity, you must turn your back and ignore the mainstream culture. The shackles when then fall away, the machines will grind to a halt, the filters will dissolve, and you will see the world for what it really is. The illusory nature of existence will end and we will all, finally, be real. — David McRaney

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace. — Richard Brautigan

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told
that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks. — Beryl Markham

According to this model, human beings are, at least in one aspect, sensation-receiving machines; and although our receptory apparatus is competent to select and organize outward stimuli within the narrow range necessary for physical survival within our environment, it does not necessarily tell us very much about the nature of that environment. People, in other words, have little access to the possible world existing beyond their sensations. — Cruce Stark

If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make everything from a spoon to a landing-craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture. — Henry Beston

Machines never made mankind happy and never will make. He who is trying to make us believe this will claim that happiness is in the machine; but it is always in the mind. That man alone who is the lord of his mind can become happy, and none else. And what, after all, is this power of machinery? Why should a man who can send a current of electricity through a wire be called a very great man and a very intelligent man? Does not nature do a million times more than that every moment? Why not then fall down and worship nature? What avails it if you have power over the whole of the world, if you have mastered every atom in the universe? That will not make you happy unless you have the power of happiness in yourself, until you have conquered yourself. — Swami Vivekananda

What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved to-day to a few privileged favourites. — Pyotr Kropotkin

Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. — Thomas Merton

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

Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth.
Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out. — Justin Cronin

In contrast, markets - oft mythologized as "natural" are the most unnatural things going. Libertarians will tell you "market laws are laws of nature", what baloney. Markets - and the other great modernist cornucopian tools - are magnificent wealth generating machines, built ad-hoc, through trial and error, constantly fine-tuned and refined, tinkered, adjusted. — David Brin