I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy – galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy – is really cool stuff, but to me, it’s about destinations.
I’m afraid for all those who’ll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!
Possibly the strangest book ever made, the ‘Codex Seraphinianus’ is an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, with illegible calligraphy – it is written in an alphabet no one can understand – and surreal drawings of odd beasts and machines.
After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.
What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.
In recent years, America’s wealthiest man has begun to tackle energy issues in a major way, investing millions in everything from high-capacity batteries to machines that can scrub carbon dioxide out of the air. With a personal fortune of $50 billion, Gates has the resources to give his favorite solutions a major boost.
Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.
I sensed my chance and embraced the telecom business. I started marketing telephones, answering/fax machines under the brand name Beetel, and the company picked up really fast.
Instead of expecting truck drivers and warehouse workers to rapidly retrain so they can compete with tireless, increasingly capable machines, let’s play to their human strengths and create opportunities for workers as companions and caregivers for our elders, our children, and our special-needs population.
I’ve never loved spending time on the machines at the gym. But I have discovered an exercise regimen I can dedicate myself to: yoga. It’s changed my body.
By definition, the Singularity means that machines would be smarter than us, and, in their wisdom, they can innovate new technologies. The innovations would come so quickly, and increasingly quickly, that the innovation would make Moore’s Law seem as antiquated as Hammurabi’s Code.
Because of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society.
The worst job that I ever did, I used to have a Saturday job cleaning the dough off bread-making machines for Warburtons in Bolton. That was horrendous.
The trains that travel the Chunnel are massive machines. The Eurostars are bullet-shaped and a quarter-mile long. They are pulled by a 136,000-pound locomotive and move in the open air at 185 m.p.h. and through the tunnel at 100 m.p.h.
I was 17 and just learning what high fidelity was, what good sound was, and learning the mechanics of tape machines. It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory.
We’re all men, not machines. We make mistakes.
Machines and people are both necessary for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google, and neither is sufficient on its own.
We need to reform our school lunch programs. We need to get healthy items into the vending machines.
You know how Bed Bath & Beyond sells those white noise machines that help you sleep? And they usually make ocean noises? I want one that’s just David Gergen gently muttering about the economy.
The Korean government is the first to declare that if you replace people with machines you have to pay a tax. It’s a tax on robots. They make private companies internalise the social cost of unemployment. Social benefit is not the same as private benefit. We have to realise this.
AI does not keep me up at night. Almost no one is working on conscious machines. Deep learning algorithms, or Google search, or Facebook personalization, or Siri or self driving cars or Watson, those have the same relationship to conscious machines as a toaster does to a chess-playing computer.
Are machines getting more and more powerful? Absolutely. It’s been going on since 1940. We are making progress, and for many people, it will be a lifesaver.
Machines can do things cheaper and better. We’re very used to that in banking, for example. ATM machines are better than tellers if you want a simple transaction. They’re faster, they’re less trouble, they’re more reliable, so they put tellers out of work.
A hundred for England is special and there’s a lot of emotion and a lot of hard work involved in getting back on the field. No one sees the hard work and all the time with the ice machines in rehab.
I think IT projects are about supporting social systems – about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.
I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early ’90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.
Luckily, voting machines register only ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ not ‘yes, but I hate myself’.
By humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another.
The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
The economic reality is that, thanks to smart machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were the backbone of Western democracies are vanishing.
The Futurists were an art movement in the early 20th century which basically glorified machines and the Industrial Revolution.
When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn’t put too much emphasis on the word ‘just.’ There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.
At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers’ apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.
People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we’re all going to starve, and it’s the machines that’ll get good.
The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar ‘commodity.’ It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn’t delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value.
Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution, yellow-pages directories, landline telephones, and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.
Workers are basically supervisors of machines.
Unfortunately, like, homework and school wasn’t the thing that I was obsessing over. It was, you know, music and making music and how to like – and drum machines. And we met Rick Rubin, and Rick Rubin had a drum machine. So I would just cut school and go to his house – his dorm room.
‘Detroit’ started based on a book called ‘The Singularity is Near’ by Ray Kurzweil, which is about this idea that one day there could be machines that are more intelligent than we are.
I love the immediacy of those old analog machines; it’s really inspiring. You just set them up to play, and they go, playing the same thing until you switch the pattern.
Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.
This is show business, and there’s room for the shows and the personalities. But I think there’s also room for music, for people to play music, and there seems to be an audience developing that’s willing to go listen to music again, rather than just be blown away by drum machines and choreography.
I love the idea of anthropomorphizing machines. I love the idea of taking technology and giving it a personality.
Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth – but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?
It took me eight years of trial and error to design the machines that would make low-cost pads: just Rs 2 each, compared to those made by the MNCs that are priced anywhere above Rs 6 to Rs 100.
Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.
