Contrary to what many romantically inclined critics of contemporary civilization say about the dehumanizing effects of machines, I believe that contact with machines (particularly complicated machines) exercises a profoundly humanizing influence in the sense of making people less brutal. The reason for that is very simple: machines do not respond to shouting and beating — to make them work one has to think and be patient. In contrast, the use of animals offers a standing lesson in the advantages of brutality — one has only to reflect upon the fact that in an industrialized country people do not carry whips.
Stanislav Andreski
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It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and f**ks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.
Gilles Deleuze
Memetics appears to have a lot of implications that we humans are machines, which people have never liked. Of course we're machines, we're biological machines. But people don't like that. Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes. People don't like that. My view is that if these things are true it doesn't matter if we like them or not.
Susan Blackmore
Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to "communicate" with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.
The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.Ivan Illich
The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly.
Maurice Wilkes
Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance. However, the machines mankind has so far found it useful to construct rarely have beliefs about beliefs, although such beliefs will be needed by computer programs that reason about what knowledge they lack and where to get it. Mental qualities peculiar to human-like motivational structures , such as love and hate, will not be required for intelligent behavior, but we could probably program computers to exhibit them if we wanted to, because our common sense notions about them translate readily into certain program and data structures. Still other mental qualities, e.g. humor and appreciation of beauty, seem much harder to model.
John McCarthy
Andreski, Stanislav
Andretti, Mario
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