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Machines Quotes

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Machines Quotes

“If instead of looking at income, you look at levels of consumption, if anything that's become more equal. The fraction of families that have a dishwasher, that have a sewing machine, that have a television set. In respect to consumption, it's very hard to avoid the view that people have been getting more equal rather than more unequal.”

“Hip hop is just a reflection of what's going on, or where the art is....Technology definitely gives artists a new mind, new voice and creativity. Right now people need to be more places at once....so whatever can get people to the next level to be efficient is how technology is going to be used......The danger is if people are relying too much on the machines, that new mind and new voice always has to come from within.”

“My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It's that economic system that has led to Western civilization's willingness to enslave ourselves to machines - because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet.”

“Machines help us do things more quickly and efficiently, but they can also destroy some community activities. Machines can also throw the weakest people out of work and this would be sad, because their small contribution to the housework or cooking is their way of giving something to the community. People who are capable of doing things very quickly with the help of machines become tremendously busy, always active, in charge of everyone - a bit like machines themselves.”

“Seriously, if I switched on the TV and they were showing live footage of an army of fire-breathing pterodactyls machine-gunning people to death on the streets of London right outside my door, I'd be horrified, but not entirely surprised, nor any more scared than I already am. I'd probably just shrug and wait for them to smash the door down. We're so screwed, I don't even know what to worry about first.”

“Look back on the utopian dreams of the previous century, or even the century before that, where people thought machines would ultimately give us a quality of life where our needs would be taken care of so we could all basically be artists together in the evening, after we had fished, hunted, raised cattle - or whatever it was Marx imagined for us.”

“I know this is going to sound crazy, but I really love working out. I know that sounds sick to some people, but I didn't love it at first. It's become a healthy addiction for me. And like, now, if I'm watching TV on the couch I'm like, "Ugh, I could be on a cardio machine watching the same thing." That's just now how my mind thinks.”

“There's all these people involved, and it becomes this huge machine - it stops being just me making my own little songs for myself, or for the world. And it's hard to stop the machine. If you want to take time to write a record, they're like, "OK, tour through March, April, and June, then you can take a few weeks off to record in July before getting back on the road for the European festival circuit." After a while, I had to put my foot down.”

“Mom used to walk with me for something like two or three miles to get to the day-old bakery. They had those machines where you buy doughnuts, those vending machines with the long johns and doughnuts. We would buy those bagels and pastries because that was our treat. And come back with shopping bags of these sweets, and who knows what was in it? That was what we could afford that could feed that many people.”

“God says, "Come out of her my people, that you be not partakers of her sins and her plagues, for her sins have reached unto heaven." We don't need the Democratic Party. We don't need the Republican Party. We can get a little from both of them, but Elijah Muhammad said we need to form our own political machine.! A machine that works for the oppressed: The oppressed Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, White.”

“The Penobscot took an initial poll of people in the state to determine if there was support for opening a casino, and the poll came back very favorable. As we moved forward, a commercial was aired that said if the tribe opened a casino the law would allow kids to gamble and had an image of a kid pulling a slot machine. Here it was our idea and we got massacred, and someone else ended up with what we wanted; it's sort of like history repeating itself.”

“Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.”

“What made so many people so upset when Steve Jobs died was that he was a kind of combination of daddy - in this relationship between the machine and ourselves - and also he was our guide. He was the one who led us to look into the mirror. He created these devices that became extensions of ourselves. Suddenly, he wasn't going to hold our hand as we went from product to product, which became increasingly about who we were.”

“I love riding on a bus now because you're looking down on the world from not too high of an angle, but people on the street rarely look up into the bus. They're sort of oblivious to this big giant machine, you know, passing by. So there's something very beautiful about the angle that you look at the world through.”

“I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.”

“It's the people who work hard and earn big that keep the machine tipping for everybody else. If everybody else was equal down the bottom rung of a ladder, nobody would be on the ladder at all because it would break and everybody would fall off backwards. So you need people at the top to help pull those people up from the bottom. You can't take that and swing to the right. You can't have everybody living in the same ordinary $60,000 house because you may as well live in Russia, Bulgaria or some other Eastern block Communist nation.”

“If you want to get an advance machine tool job today, you need to know calculus. We know a lot of people don't, we can't expect everyone to know calculus, what do we do? We created a huge bubble that created a huge number of jobs to build houses and to be in retail. You don't have to have a lot of skills to work in the new Gap store that opened, at the latest Starbucks branch, or to hammer a nail for a new house.”