Concepts are, so to speak, problem-solving devices, the internal equivalent of technologies; they are the technologies of the mind...-machine. Concepts, theories, hypotheses, distinctions, comparisons--all these may be taken ultimately as instruments for organizing perceptions into logically consistent patterns called explanations. But they do not and cannot awaken in man a new quality of feeling or perceiving, a new organ or faculty of awareness. Concepts are no more nor less than tools by which man combines or analyzes that which he already knows through perceptions. If man's perceptions are limited mainly to the external senses, concepts can do no more than organize the material collected by the senses. Concepts can never reach beyond the level of perception at which man lives. Ideas, on the other hand, evoke, support, and require a higher level of awareness itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Above all, however, the machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of proba...bility. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then for a moment all there was was size, Confusion, and a roar that drowned the cries... He raised against the gods in the machine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ben Guarino: Whad'a we goin' to do about these machine guns? Chief Detective: What can we do about them? There's no law again...st manufacturing them, just against havin' them. They can't get 'em in one state, they go across the border and get 'em in another. These fellows bootleg machine guns like they bootleg booze. Ben Guarino: Yeah, they better do somethin' about that, because with these toys to play with what happened before will look like a tea party.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The press, the machine, the railroad, the telegraph are premises whose conclusion once a thousand years have passed no one has dar...ed to draw as yet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...the promise of automation seemed to exert a magnetic force, a seduction that promised to fulfill a dream of perfect control and... heal egos wounded by their needs for certainty. The dream contains the image of "people serving a smart machine," but in the shadow of the dream, human beings have lost the experience of critical judgment that would allow them to no longer simply respond but to know better than, to question, to say no.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and c...omedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disap...pointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even a...ccepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »