Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.

People are craving this great progress in electronics, going after computers, the Internet, etc. It's a giant progress technologically. But they must have a balance of soul, a balance for human beauty. That means art has an important role.

The empire of man over things is founded on the ... sciences.

... as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world.

As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.

Automation does not need to be our enemy. I think machines can make life easier for men, if men do not let the machines dominate them.

The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

Machines are on track to be on par with human intelligence in less than 15 years.

We have reason not to be afraid of the machine, for there is always constructive change, the enemy of machines, making them change to fit new conditions.

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.

I think technology is such that we can reach new heights but we need some of the basics of the pre-technological age. It's counter-productive to be able to type a hundred words a minute but not know what the words mean.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

God sinks into dust before man.

Machines were devised not to do a man out of a job, but to take the heavy labor from man's back and place it on the broad back of the machine.

It's hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they're always smarter than you think.

Sing your praise of progress and the doom machine, the naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.

The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

We have over 60 million machines that can take the same diskette, plug it in and immediately ah, that that software's working. And so it's created the worldwide software industry that... that is so very competitive and moving so quickly.

If chess is a vast jungle, computers are the chainsaws in a giant environmentally insensitive logging company.

I believe more than ever, machines will put new challenges, and that means we'll have to be more creative and more human, because that's the way to make the difference.

Before information age, living standards basically were flat. Since then, they've been growing 2 percent a year were about 30 times richer. So technology, machines is really, you know, arguably the most important thing that's happened to humanity in terms of our living standards. You could look to the introduction of digital computers in the 1950s.

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.