Machine Dependency Quotes

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.

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It's that economic system that has led to Western civilization's willingness to enslave ourselves to machines - because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet.

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.

When I was finishing grad school, the hot new PC was the IBM 286. Bulky. Immobile. Expensive. I touched-typed easily and quickly, but nevertheless, I realized that the machine was a chain.

If India becomes the slave of the machine, then, I say, heaven save the world.

As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine.

I am all for your using machines, but do not let them use you.

I think there's a tendency for modern man to become dominated by gadgets and machines, taking us further and further away from the things I've been talking about.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.

The outsourcing of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain’s own ability to remember things.

We're plugged in 24 hours a day now. We're all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not. And if we can't unplug from that machine, eventually we're going to become mindless.

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

Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter - for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had - first they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine.

The successful construction of all machinery depends on the perfection of the tools employed; and whoever is a master in the arts of tool-making possesses the key to the construction of all machines... The contrivance and construction of tools must therefore ever stand at the head of the industrial arts.