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If your washing machine stops working and you're addicted to appliances that work, you'll get upset and you will suffer. If you prefer that your appliances work well, then when your washing machine breaks down you won't compound the problem by superimposing your uncomfortable emotions on the situation.
Can you imagine being Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1400s trying to describe his ideas for machines that would allow humans to fly to the average person of his time? This is hundreds of years before the invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and many other things we take for granted today.
I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.
Tinguely wasn't the first artist to work with machines. But others were more interested in precision, in what machines are meant to do. What made him different was the random element. He introduced the mechanical accident. He was always interested in the immaterial, in sound, smoke, speed, light, shadows.
Screening telephone calls with a receptionist or the humbler answering machine is not a dishonorable thing to do. The warmest people in the world still need uninterrupted time to attend to their lives and should not be outwitted if they have made it obvious that they are not always available upon summons.
Instead of expecting truck drivers and warehouse workers to rapidly retrain so they can compete with tireless, increasingly capable machines, let's play to their human strengths and create opportunities for workers as companions and caregivers for our elders, our children, and our special-needs population.
When I tell children that they are far too dependent on their gizmos, they do not deny it. But they really don't care. This is their real life - texting about trivial things; listening to numbing music on their private headphones. The machines block everything out - you create your own little trivial world.
The truth is that throughout my careers in both chess and the martial arts, I often knew that my rivals were more naturally gifted than me - either with their mental machines or their bodies. But I have believed in my training, my approach to learning, and my ability to rise to the challenge under pressure.
Silos and bureaucracy are well-oiled machines in corporate America, but they are ultimately perpetuated by individual behavior. If we start behaving differently, we can create change. In other words, shifting your focus onto the team - or the ship as a whole, not just yourself - will have meaningful impact.
Everybody's always asking me about my blood pressure. They did an interview once where they hooked me up to a blood pressure machine and they'd rile me. I'd yell and scream, and then it would just go back to normal in a few minutes. Everything else is probably rotting, but the blood pressure is spectacular.
We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man! ... And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we are gonna do. We are gonna have a good time... We are gonna have a party.
This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will.
We are afraid of ourselves and our own unconscious minds. When we are building something that reflects us, it's the one thing we're all afraid to face. We're afraid to face ourselves. Building machines that mirror our consciousness is a very frightening proposition because we have seen how evil people can be.
Consider radiology. Technology is going to reduce the use of those machines because doctors aren't going to need to send patients two or three times for radiology. They're going to have access to what the previous specialist took. There's also going to be devices that are coming out that are much less costly.
It is widely accepted and understood that consumer decisions are as much influenced by emotional attachments to a product or service as by factors like price and performance. So why is it that when it comes to most aspects of human transportation, the world still seems to believe people are rational machines?
I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.
Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death.
We hated Bauhaus. It was a bad time in architecture. They just didn’t have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a machine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.
'Feminist comedy,' practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies' war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children.
The sole perfection which modern civilization attains is a mechanical one; machines are splendid and flawless, but the life which serves them or is served by them, is neither superb nor brilliant, nor more perfect nor more graceful; nor is the work of the machines perfect; only they, the machines, are like gods.
As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications.
A lot of the gear came out of some of the old studios here in New York City. We picked up a lot of old microphones, reverb tanks, tape machines, so yeah, we try to record the old way, which takes more time and energy, but it certainly feels better when you're getting to the end of the process of making a record.
The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.
Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.
When I was on 'Terra Nova', I had an Australian iPhone and a U.S. iPhone, different time zones, just a couple differences in the machines, but I was able to keep the international aspect of things in order. But I lost my U.S. iPhone right before I left Australia. Somebody's got it somewhere out there. Send it back?
What I worry about ultimately is that when we're stripped of our privacy, when we're stripped of free will, when we start to merge with machines in a more robust way, at some point, we'll cease to be identifiably human. And therefore, I think our humanity is, in some ways, the thing that's under existential threat.
Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.
I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.
We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.
There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners.
Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been.
I use Mac. Not because it's more secure than everything else - because it is actually less secure than Windows - but I use it because it is still under the radar. People who write malicious code want the greatest return on their investment, so they target Windows systems. I still work with Windows in virtual machines.
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar 'commodity.' It can't be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn't delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value.
Did you ever hear one of those corny, positive messages on someone's answering machine? 'Hi, it's a great day and I'm out enjoying it right now. I hope you are too. The thought for the day is share the love.' Beep. 'Uh, yeah, this is the VD clinic. Speaking of being positive, your test is back. Stop sharing the love.'
In a startup car company, everything you do has to be done in a different way than a traditional car company. And the main reason is that all of these big car companies are operating like giant well-oiled machines - you could put a very seasoned executive in, and all he has to do is make sure the machine keeps running.
A lot of jobs today are being automated; what happens when you extend that concept to very important areas of society like law enforcement? What happens if you start controlling the behavior of criminals or people in general with software-running machines? Those questions, they look like they're sci-fi but they're not.
In recent years, America's wealthiest man has begun to tackle energy issues in a major way, investing millions in everything from high-capacity batteries to machines that can scrub carbon dioxide out of the air. With a personal fortune of $50 billion, Gates has the resources to give his favorite solutions a major boost.
Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.
Since young people would much rather play fast-action, rapidly advancing video games, and gambling laws for slot machines and roulette tables haven't changed much since the 1950s, look for casinos to build large video game tournament centers and allow people to bet on the action, similar to betting on college basketball.
I was the first artist, I think, to ever do an all-keyboard album. There were things that resembled it, like Stevie Wonder. A lot of his stuff was on keyboards, but he used brass and he used other things as well. I was the first artist, also, to use drum machines. I was really the one who kind of started that whole thing.
Things that are so hard for people, like playing championship-level Go and poker, have turned out to be relatively easy for the machines. Yet at the same time, the things that are easiest for a person - like making sense of what they see in front of them, speaking in their mother tongue - the machines really struggle with.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
Doing research for 'Penumbra,' I read quite a bit about the early history of printing, and the more I did, the more it sounded like... the Internet today. There was crazy competition and upheaval; there were constant arguments about new techniques, new materials, new machines; and, of course, there were fortunes to be made.
Every year, in our country, we churn out more job seekers rather than job creators. We have to look at new business models, identify a problem, and work on a solution for the same. Today, the machines I have created have provided employment to many women in the rural areas across the country. Why can't youngsters follow suit?
As Frederick Douglas, the famous abolitionist, said: "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." You need the truth, and you also need a demand, and you need to bring that demand into the realm of electoral politics. If you don't do that, it's very hard to get such an entrenched machine to move.
There is a construct in computer programming called 'the infinite loop' which enables a computer to do what no other physical machine can do - to operate in perpetuity without tiring. In the same way it doesn't know exhaustion, it doesn't know when it's wrong and it can keep doing the wrong thing over and over without tiring.
So if there was a way that I knew something about my character's desires or the things that they were resisting because I was saving it for some grand epiphany moment for my readers, I just feel like that's when you can feel the machine at work in a story. That's when you can feel the writer pulling the strings of the puppet.
I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that.
My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business.