Norbert Wiener Quotes

People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.

Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.

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

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.

The Machine is the new Messiah. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.

We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.

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

In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.

Although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the Universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.

The further a device is removed from human control, the more authentically mechanical it seems, and the whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct human control and more and more under their own apparent will.

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

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.

With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives--military, medical, economic and financial, political--it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it.

There is not a tool, an implement, or a machine that has not resulted in a decrease in the contribution of human labor. Labor is not made permanently idle [though]; when replaced in one special category... it turns its attack against other obstacles on the main road to progress.

Almost every profession I look at where you require human labor or you require intelligence, I see computers being able to do better than us within the next 10 years. I'm talking about a mass replacement of humans with artificial intelligence and robots.

There will be little drudgery in this better ordered world. Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of anyone.

I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

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

I remember mentioning to friends back in 1938 that the world chess champion would be beaten by a computer in 50 years time. Today we know computers are not far from this goal.

In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy man's need for affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense.

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.

Machine makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine.