Automata were masterpieces of art and engineering. Forgotten wonders of an extraordinary age. ibid.
Tonight: the challenges for businesses and workers in the new age of technology. And the extent that our jobs might be at risk from new intelligent machines. Tonight: Man Versus Machines, ITV 2014
Terminators, unmanned vehicles, synthetic organisms – is the Military merging human DNA and artificial intelligence to create killing machines that may one day rule the world? Conspiracy Files Unsealed s10e1: Rise of the Machines, 2012
The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. Andy Warhol
Andy Worhol: ‘I want to be a machine.’ Great Artists in Their Own Words II: Out of the Darkness 1939-1966, BBC 2016
When the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you’re so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all. Unknown protester, cited Fool Me Twice, 2007
I’m a back-street mechanic. Fred Dibnah’s World of Steam, Steel and Stone: Back Street Mechanic, BBC 2006
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveller betwixt life and death. William Wordsworth
It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of the word. Thomas Carlyle
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are. Clive James
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. Alan Turing
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. Alan Turing
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are ‘duplicate me’ instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites. Richard Dawkins
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too. Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces. D H Lawrence, Selected Letters
We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us. John Kenneth Galbraith
It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. John Stuart Mill, cited Colin Renfrew, The Emergence of Civilisation, 1972
The machine itself ... is a human product, and its very abstractions make it more definitely human in one sense than those human arts which on occasion realistically counterfeit nature. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization: Assimilation of the Machine
Today this unquestioned faith in the machine has been severely shaken. The absolute validity of the machine has become a conditioned validity: even Spengler, who has urged the men of his generation to become engineers and men of fact, regards that career as a sort of honorable suicide and looks forward to the period when the monuments of the machine civilization will be tangled masses of rusting iron and empty concrete shells. While for those of us who are more hopeful both of man’s destiny and that of the machine, the machine is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression of our desires: it is merely a series of instruments, which we will use in so far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail where they infringe upon it or exist purely to support the adventitious structure of capitalism. ibid. ch8
Once the major wants of mankind are satisfied by the machine process, our factory system must be on a basis of regular annual replacement instead of progressive expansion – not on a basis of premature replacement through debauched workmanship, adulterated materials, and grossly stimulated caprice. ‘The case,’ as Mr J A Hobson again puts it, ‘is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such a variety enables him to utilize a larger proportion of the aggregate matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, which we call Art, we pass outside the limit of matter and are no longer slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns.’ In other words: a genuine standard, once the vital physical wants are satisfied, tends to change the plane of consumption and therefore to limit, in a considerable degree, the extent of further mechanical enterprise. ibid.
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them. Saint-Exupéry, ‘Wind, Sand, and Stars’ 1939
I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions. Charles Darwin, cited Desmond & James & Moore, Darwin 1994
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 ail these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them! Henrik Johan Ibsen, The Pillars of Society
All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance-of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779
DNA organisms will eventually evolve into machines. Stephen Hawking
Machines will replace all DNA-based life. Stephen Hawking
If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, The Tribune 12 April 1946
The carapace of the instrument binnacle, the inclined planes and ashtrays gleamed around me like altarpieces, their geometries reaching towards my body like the stylized embraces of some hyper-cerebral machine. J G Ballard, Crash p200
As we have seen, a great deal of the work which was formerly done by human beings is now being done by machinery. This machinery belongs to a few people: it is being worked for the benefit of those few, just the same as were the human beings it displaced. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
The next change came with the introduction of steam machinery. That power came to the aid of mankind in their struggle for existence, enabling them to create easily and in abundance those things which they had previously been able to produce only a bare sufficiency. A wonderful power – equalling and surpassing the marvels that are imagined by the writers of fairy tales and Eastern stories – a power so vast – so marvellous, that it is difficult to find words to convey anything like an adequate conception of it. ibid.
The machinery became the property of a comparatively few individuals and private companies, who use it not for the benefit of the community but to create profits for themselves. ibid.
Our civilisation, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely that one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
In 2013 a Russian internet millionaire funded a conference in New York with an extraordinary aim – to see if a system could be created that would allow him to live for ever. Horizon: The Immortalist, BBC 2016
Is it so crazy to think we could live for ever in machines? ibid.
Something remarkable is happening in the heart of two of our biggest cities. One of the most advanced and expensive cancer treatments in the world is being installed in Manchester and London. This is no ordinary medical cure. It will involve two nine-ton machines firing beams of radiation at two-thirds the speed of light. It will cost more than a quarter of billion pounds, but it will save thousands of lives. Until now, patients in need of this pioneering treatment have had to travel abroad … Proton Beam Therapy. Horizon: The 250 Million Pound Cancer Cure, BBC 2019
A crucial piece of technology that will sit within it – the Cyclotron. ibid.