Tod Machover Quotes

I make short films, little documentaries, about the co-evolution of humans and technology.

All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.

To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

We are gods. Our tools make us gods. In symbiosis with our technology, our powers are expanding exponentially and so, too, our possibilities.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that binary.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?

...A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

We cannot idealize technology. Technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination, and its uses must be conditioned by our own values.

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we'll augment our intelligence.

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

We're witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It's already happening. And I think that the good news is that it's coming just in time.

With the revolution in information technology, with the revolution in transport technologies, I think just geography has lost its all significance.

Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.

Small changes can magnifiy. The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.

Technology usually provides a series of tradeoffs. Each asset is offset by a deficit...A major problem occurs when those who suffer from technology's defecits and those who benefit are not the same people.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself. And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don't think that we will become the machines of the machines.

I think people tend to be worried about every new technology that comes along.