Machine Sentience Quotes

They also,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, 'refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists. ~ Iain M. Banks

Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. ~ Stephen Hawking

My own guess is that quite quickly the machine intelligence will start dreaming machine dreams and thinking machine thoughts, both of which would totally incomprehensible to us. This would then lead to each species, we and the machines, moving off on to its own separate life trajectory. ~ John L. Casti

If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine. ~ Sherry Turkle

The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Zedd planted his fists on his hips and turned a look on Cara. "Now Mord-Sith have become experts in magic. What next?" "A talking machine," Nicci said. ~ Terry Goodkind

The firepower uncovered in March 2005 in Sant'Anastasia, a town at the foot of Vesuvius, was
stunning. The discovery came about partly by chance, and partly by the lack of discipline of the arms
traffickers: customers and drivers started fighting on the street because they couldn't agree on the
price. When the carabinieri arrived, they removed the interior panels of the truck parked near the
brawl, discovering one of the largest mobile depots they had ever seen. Uzis with four magazines,
seven clips, and 112 380-caliber bullets, Russian and Czech machine guns able to fire 950 shots a
minute. (Nine hundred fifty shots a minute was the firing power of American helicopters in Vietnam.)
Weapons for ripping apart tanks and entire divisions of men, not for Camorra family fights on the
slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Almost new, well-oiled, rifle numbers still intact, just in from Kraków. ~ Roberto Saviano

Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you? ~ Andy Warhol

There's a machine that I have nothing to do with. It's called the "Tupac Machine." ~ Tupac Shakur

Our belief in a world external to ourselves, filled with things and people that are not us, is an overwhelming fact of our existence. But similarly, our absolute certainty that there is more to reality than just this physical world is a spiritual fact that bears more truth than any other in our lives. We seek to explain this spiritual nature as some metaphysical reality, accepting the constraint of Science that will not allow for any usurpation of the actuality of the physical universe. And we flounder trying. Once we allow our thoughts to be forced into some metaphysical realm, we find ourselves stripped of that single most important validation of spiritual truth – the undeniable presence at the heart of our existence. This is the spiritual truth that we seek, and it is not to be found in the physical reality of Science. The physical reality of Science is to be found in it! "An Introduction to Awareness" is a philosophical journey that takes the reader into the heart of this pure presence of nondual reality – a reality in which the spiritual is not metaphysical, but actual, in which physical reality is 'a machine in the ghost'. This pure presence that we cannot deny is the awareness that lies at the heart of our experiences and thoughts. This irrefutable truth is used as a starting point in a processual analysis of awareness, and of our ideas about existence and self, leading to a clear understanding of the nondual nature of reality as the pure presence of non-individuated A ~ James M. Corrigan

If you treat what you value most in life more like a garden and less like a vending machine, you'll probably be happier. (from You Oughta Know By Now) ~ Brian P. Cleary

I have always looked upon a telephone as an official kind of machine which you prepared for with fasting and prayer, and only had recourse to when strictly necessary for important business. ~ C.N. Williamson

Don't belittle the hurt that has been caused by the job-destroying machine that is the European Union. ~ Michael Gove

Let the machine take care of the machines, and I'll go spend more time with my family, or golf. ~ Mark Goddard

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. ~ Charles Darwin

Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a time machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.
Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.
Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it. So it goes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I come from a family of musicians. Even the sewing machine is a Singer. ~ Frank Carson

Seconds turn into minutes and minutes into hours. It is all still the same. Or it no longer is. If I were to ask what has changed, perhaps nothing, but conceivably everything would be the befitting reply. I no longer feel the same.
Loss preceded me, alienating my soul from the body. I feel I am gliding through an alley making a journey from the known towards the unknown. There is a deep abyss inside where sometime back, my heart used to beat and a noisy, rusty old machine has replaced my mind; solitarily creating useless noise.
I don't remember what day it is and since when have I been lying here. It must have been yesterday… or was it day before. I cannot recollect anything except the dull throbbing pain inside my brain. I can see the time, almost 9: 45, difficult to say which time of the day it is.
The bigger hand is soon going to overshadow the smaller hand. It looks like a game of cat and mouse; the bigger hand chasing the smaller one. Anyone stronger in terms of physical appearance, money, power, fame or name tramples upon the weak ones - that is the rule of the world. There are only two possible reasons behind it, love or hate. When you love someone you want to control everything that person does and hence, sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly you squash them like melons.
While on the other hand in the case of hate, there is no need to specify the reason for walking over someone like that. Hate is a strong reason in itself. I am confused as to what ~ Namrata

I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire - a crackpot machine - that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. ... Edward Abbey (1927-1989) ~ Edward Abbey

Mother vanished for many days. She was, as I would find out later, in a psychiatric hospital, tucked away as if she were a dangerous explosive material. There had been a cataclysmic explosion of her mind, and her perception of the known world had been blasted into smithereens.Her senses became imbued with extraordinary sensitivity so that to her ears the sound of the clock in her ward
became noisier than the din of a drilling machine. The sound of a
rat came to her as the peal of many bells. ~ Chigozie Obioma

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change. ~ H.G.Wells

With twelve horse power at our command, we considered that we could permit the weight of the machine with operator to rise to 750 or 800 pounds, and still have as much surplus power as we had originally allowed for in the first estimate of 550 pounds. ~ Orville Wright

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.
Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, it the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much. ~ Michael Pollan

Roarke didn't quite make it to Eve's office. He found her down the corridor, in front of one of the vending machines. She and the machine appeared to be in the middle of a vicious argument.

"I put the proper credits in, you blood-sucking, money-grubbing son of a bitch." Eve punctuated this by slamming her fist where the machine's heart would be, if it had one.

ANY ATTEMPT TO VANDALIZE, DEFACE, OR DAMAGE THIS UNIT IS A CRIMINAL OFFENSE.

The machine spoke in a prissy, singsong voice Roarke was certain was sending his wife's blood pressure through the roof.

THIS UNIT IS EQUIPPED WITH SCANEYE, AND HAS RECORDED YOUR BADGE NUMBER. DALLAS, LIEUTENANT EVE. PLEASE INSERT PROPER CREDIT, IN COIN OR CREDIT CODE, FOR YOUR SELECTION. AND REFRAIN FROM ATTEMPTING TO VANDALIZE, DEFACE, OR DAMAGE THIS UNIT.

"Okay, I'll stop attempting to vandalize, deface, or damage you, you electronic street thief. I'll just do it."

She swung back her right foot, which Roarke had cause to know could deliver a paralyzing kick from a standing position. But before she could follow through he stepped up and nudged her off balance.

"Please, allow me, Lieutenant."

"Don't put any more credits in that thieving bastard," she began, then hissed when Roarke did just that.

"Candy bar, I assume. Did you have any lunch?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know it's just going to keep stealing if people like you pander to it."< ~ J.D. Robb

I actually wanted to be a fashion designer. I did a lot with the sewing machine at home - - for Barbie or for carnival or just for fun. Then I saw this ad in the newspaper. And as young girls sometimes do some stupid things, I filled in the coupon and sent in my photos. ~ Heidi Klum

The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality. ~ Max Horkheimer

What am I more than elaborate sentience? ~ Derek Parfit

One thing is certain: the riddle of mind, long a topic for philosophers, has taken on new urgency. Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians
threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. ~ Sherry Turkle

Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution. ~ John W. Gardner

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine, that's what we are. ~ Mickey Hart

We got touring with the Stones, and people were trying to keep up with Keith. He's like a human machine with a constitution of iron, and they all thought they could do the same. ~ Ron Wood

I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it. ~ Margaret Drabble

Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy. ~ Hans Zinsser

When I finally did sit down in front of the machine - a familiar object, I had seen it daily when we were living together - I was reminded of how abrupt and unnatural death always is, at least as we experience it: always an interruption, always things that are left unfinished. This was manifested in Christopher's laptop, the desktop was covered in an intricate mosaic of files and document, there were at least a hundred different and sometimes oddly named folders - other people's work, internet. You name a folder without thinking, there are obvious names for some - accounts, articles - but others have the quality of junk drawers, you hardly remember their contents, you never imagine that one day someone else would be rummaging through them. ~ Katie Kitamura

Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won't work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned. ~ Arundhati Roy

When I'm panicked about my love handles, I go to the YMCA and get obsessed with Kid Rock videos as I'm on the running machine. ~ Emily Mortimer

The global equalization of wages and the exponential growth in technology has created a job-killing machine that's only going to get worse. ~ Jeff Greene

I call it "pedal magic" and only those who ride know the utter ecstasy of bicycling. Pressing a pedal toward Earth gives flight to my fancy. Every rotation powers my traveling machine toward yet another date with destiny. The breeze clears my senses. The wind blows away my troubles. The sun shines upon my future. Spinning spokes create flashing metal upon an endless path-cycling feels like an infinite spiritual rush. It cleanses my mind. All my troubles fade into joy. ~ Frosty Wooldridge

The hybrid I have now is one of the least expensive cars I've ever had. I had a BMW 318i convertible once, the ultimate driving machine. ~ Sean Astin

It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depth by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

You stick a credit card in a machine, and you pay $3 or whatever it is to get cash - your own money. ~ Bill Janklow