Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed; investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition; applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like. Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

Only in a minority of cases will workmen be able to recognize the technological change responsible for their dismissal. For this it would be necessary that machines be introduced in an existent plant under the eyes of the workmen and that dismissal be effected immediately after.

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.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

… increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor

I worry that if you see a row of self-checkouts, you think, 'That all used to be jobs and real people.'

Because of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society.

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 sole perfection which modern civilization attains is a mechanical one; machines are splendid and flawless, but the life which serves them or is served by them, is neither superb nor brilliant, nor more perfect nor more graceful; nor is the work of the machines perfect; only they, the machines, are like gods.

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.

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

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.

I don't buy into the dystopian scenarios of self-aware robots enslaving mankind, but you don't have to be a sci-fi conspiracy theorist to acknowledge that plenty of good, well-paying jobs are being taken over by machines.

Next time round Hitler will be a machine.

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

By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.

Never send a human to do a machine's job.

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

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

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

Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves.

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody's time never watches the foreman never talks back.