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Quote by K.W. Jeter

“Why would the off-world colonists want troublesome, humanlike slaves rather than nice, efficient machines? It's simple. Machines don't suffer. They aren't capable of it. A machine doesn't know when it's being raped. There's no power relationship between you and a machine. That's been the U.N.'s whole pitch about the attractions of the off-world colonies all along. The big human thrill. For a replicant to suffer, to give its owners that whole master-slave energy, it has to have emotions.”

Quote by K.W. Jeter

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Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human

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K.W. Jeter

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“And so experts have been the missing link in our understanding of the special interpenetration of man and machine that has made the American Century, peculiarly American. We all know something about machines, but experts know everything—if not about machines, at least about a particular machine. We are thus weighted down by a heavy reliance of experts, with much of our time spent in search of the right expert in whom to place confidence for the repair of our mechanical problems”

“The obvious part is that the machine makes us its captive servants - by its rhythm, by its convenience, by the cost of stopping it or the drawbacks of not using it. As captives we come to resemble it in our pace, rigidity and uniform expectations. But there is in mechanism a subtler influence. The machine is an agent of abstraction. It is itself an abstraction in that it does one particular task (or at most two or three) and yields identical products. There is no fringe or fancy, no happy error or sudden innovation as in the handworker's performance. That is why machine-made things rarely draw our glance more than the few times when they are new and handy. They induce no subsequent reverie, no speculation, and no love, The robot is a repulsive caricature of Man. When the domestic or public landscape is filled with objects deprived of any aura, it is as if the world of living things had been reduced by abstraction to something emphatically not alive.”

“In our country, it often appears that the government, officials, politicians, law enforcement, and institutions lack the will to effectively combat crime and corruption. This perception is fueled by concerns that some may be complicit or benefiting from these issues. Instead of supporting those who stand against crime and corruption, there are troubling instances where such individuals face resistance or harm, seemingly because they threaten vested interests.”

“The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.”

“When we make stories, when we turn raw events into personal sagas, parables, tales, and anecdotes, we are often struggling to come to terms with one of the inescapably difficult and puzzling facts of existence. Storytelling is an attempt to deal with and at least partly contain the terrifyingly haphazard quality of life. Large parts of life, sometimes the mots crucial parts, depend on random happenings, contingency. A woman turns a corner, meets a strange man, two years later they marry, they have children together – and in twenty years, there are adults walking the earth who would not have existed if that woman had not turned that corner on that day. The human results of that apparently random event may go on for hundreds or even thousands of years, a single stray moment casting its shadow into an unimaginably long future. We can gaze on this fact with wonder; but we may also grow uneasy in contemplating it, because it emphasizes how little we control the course of our lives”