The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?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 »
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 »
Like figures on an ancient clock, Warrior, or saint, or clown... (All's one to the machine) that wake When each stale hour is done, And with preliminary whirr Play their allotted role, Stiffly advance, engage, retire Trembling a little still, So blandly nodding Death and I Nearer and nearer march, At the click of night and the click of day, -- Click-clack! We approach, we approach!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »