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Machines Quotes

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Machines Quotes

“So many computer languages try to force you into one way of thinking and Perl is very much the opposite of that approach. It's kind of like a, well, sometimes Perl has been called the Swiss army chainsaw of the internet, but it's more like a Swiss army machine shop. It really gives you a lot of tools, some of which are dangerous, but it lets you get your job done very quickly.”

“As we let go of the machine model of work, we begin to step back and see ourselves in new ways, to appreciate wholeness, and to design organizations that honor and make use of the totality of who we are.”

“I can make dough in a machine faster than I can make it by hand, but I want to make it by hand, because I want to remember the way it feels. It's so important for me to make it by hand - whether it's a pasta dough or a pâte brisée. You become involved in it. You become personal with it. For me it's such a wonderful way to get satisfaction and gratification when I'm cooking.”

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

“In my creature impatience I am often caused to wish that there were some way to bring modern Christians into a deeper spiritual life painlessly by short, easy lessons; but such wishes are vain. No shortcut exists. God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: The man who would know God must give time to Him.”

“I am convinced that an electronic machine, no matter how smart and intelligent, being still a mere spatial structure in concept, can neither innovate nor even understand the self-evident proposition: 'No spatial structure can be a representation of any feeling'. Such innovation can only be a work of a non-spatial mind, like a human being, and only such innovation, it should be acknowledged, can pave the way for further scientific achievements.”

“I remember a few years ago I was sitting at home with my wife watching the Oscars. I was sitting on the couch and suddenly heard my voice. It's thrilling. It's interesting that a lot of guys do me. I have a friend who does me on his answering machine so when I call him I talk to myself. I don't really know what that comes from. It doesn't seem to me that I speak in a strange way. My wife says Kevin's (Spacey) the best.”

“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.”

“One thing I loved about New Zealand was the indoor/outdoor lifestyle of the place. I remember going from Xboxing, jamming out on guitars and drum machines in my buddy's apartment, to a bike ride through the parks and up and down the streets all over the city, to the ocean, right into the water. I remember we were swimming outer ways and we got to a certain place where we wanted to see - or I wanted to see - how deep the water was.”

“The key question facing those of us working in the media (old and new) is whether we embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can't be resurrected. There is no question that, as the industry moves forward and we figure out the new rules of the road, there will be - and needs to be - a great deal of experimentation with new revenue models.”

“The parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a community. But this would involve communication. Each would have to know what the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own purpose and progress.”

“Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.”

“I think the Trump thing is particularly egregious, and I think he's as much a product of the GOP lie machine in the era of Roger Ailes as he is of television. And also, of the Twitter era. Of the everything-is-as-reductive-as-it-can-be. To me, the most telling thing is we have a man who cannot complete a sentence. Certainly could never get to 140 characters, or past it. He thinks in tiny little bursts - the way he tweets.”

“I had invented my own system, my own way of making electronic music at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and I was using what is now referred to as a classical electronic music studio, consisting of tube oscillators and patch bays. There were no mixers or synthesizers. So I managed to figure out how to make the oscillators sing. I used a tape delay system using two tape recorders and stringing the tape between the two tape machines and being able to configure the tracks coming back in different ways.”

“I became interested in the delay, having sounds recorded and played back and then come back. I did many different configurations of sending signals from one track back to another track, or to the same track, or crisscrossing them and so forth. I worked on masking the delays so when I played into the machine, I would make long tones and collect sounds in such a way that you didn't hear the delay, although sometimes you did.”

“All of us in a bipartisan manner went out of our way to explain to the voters how our election systems are secure, the fact that voting systems are not connected to the Internet - not the machines that we use to mark ballots, not the machines that we use to count ballots, the fact that our election counting procedures are very transparent.”

“I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.”

“Take a very striking case in point: the Russian Bolsheviks. [Vladimir] Lenin created an alleged workers' party, which in every way reflected the Czarist machine, in order to deal with Czarism. And the danger and the hazards of trying to accommodate libertarian principles to the political process as we know it today is that one begins to dissolve the libertarian principles. So I would say that there is an inconsistency there that should be explored.”

“I kind of pride myself on coming onto things that are well-oiled machines and finding a way to bring what I bring and fit in, and raise it to another level if I can. And this [Code Black ] has been another one of those really fun success stories, much like Parks And Recreation, although obviously on the other side of the comedy/drama equation.”

“Artificial intelligence uses a complex set of rules - algorithms - to get to a conclusion. A computer has to calculate its way through all those rules, and that takes a lot of processing. So AI works best when a small computer is using it on a small problem - your car's anti-lock brakes are based on AI. Or you need to use a giant computer on a big problem - like IBM using a room-size machine to compete against humans on Jeopardy in 2011.”