"The successful construction of all machinery depends on the perfection of the tools employed; and whoever is a master in the arts of tool-making possesses the key to the construction of all machines. [...] The contrivance and construction of tools must therefore ever stand at the head of the industrial arts." (Charles Babbage, "The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England", 1851)
"As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise - by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?" (Charles Babbage, "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher", 1864)
"Let us look for a moment at the general significance of the fact that calculating machines actually exist, which relieve mathematicians of the purely mechanical part of numerical computations, and which accomplish the work more quickly and with a greater degree of accuracy; for the machine is not subject to the slips of the human calculator. The existence of such a machine proves that computation is not concerned with the significance of numbers, but that it is concerned essentially only with the formal laws of operation; for it is only these that the machine can obey - having been thus constructed - an intuitive perception of the significance of numbers being out of the question." (Felix Klein, "Elementarmathematik vom holieren Standpunkte aus", 1908)
"A computer
would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into
believing that it was human." (Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and
Intelligence", Mind Vol. 59, 1950)
"If one wants to make a machine mimic the behaviour of the human computer in some complex operation one has to ask him how it is done, and then translate the answer into the form of an instruction table. Constructing instruction tables is usually described as 'programming'." (Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind Vol. 59, 1950)
"The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer." (Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind Vol. 59, 1950)
"The original question, 'Can machines think?:, I believe too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted." (Alan M Turing, 1950)
"The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles." (Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind Vol. 59, 1950)
"Cybernetics is not merely another branch of science. It is an intellectual revolution that rivals in importance the earlier Industrial Revolution. Is it possible that just as a machine can take over the routine functions of human muscle, another can take over the routine uses of human mind? Cybernetics answers, yes." (Isaac Asimov, [preface to Pierre de Latil’s Thinking by Machine] 1957)
"A machine is not a genie, it does not work by magic, it does not possess a will, and […] nothing comes out which has not been put in, barring of course, an infrequent case of malfunctioning. [..] The “intentions” which the machine seems to manifest are the intentions of the human programmer, as specified in advance, or they are subsidiary intentions derived from these, following rules specified by the programmer. […] The machine will not and cannot do any of these things until it has been instructed as to how to proceed. […] To believe otherwise is either to believe in magic or to believe that the existence of man’s will is an illusion and that man’s actions are as mechanical as the machine’s." (Arthur L Samuel, Science, 1960)
"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion", and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." (Irving J Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", Advances in Computers Vol. 6, 1965)
"In short, the scientific account of affairs involved the formalization of interactions between men, machines, materials and money, all spread over [a] complex system." (Stafford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1966)
"These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to 'think', and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer." (Donald Knuth, “The Art of Computer Programming”, 1968)
"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do." (Burrhus F Skinner, "Contingencies of Reinforcement", 1969)
"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Humberto Maturana, “Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living”, 1980)
"The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine." (Humberto Maturana, “Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living”, 1980)
"Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)
"How machines are related to each other often determines the organizational structure [of the people]." (John A Reinecke & William F Schoell, , Introduction to Business, 1983)
"Cybernetics is simultaneously the most important science of the age and the least recognized and understood. It is neither robotics nor freezing dead people. It is not limited to computer applications and it has as much to say about human interactions as it does about machine intelligence. Today’s cybernetics is at the root of major revolutions in biology, artificial intelligence, neural modeling, psychology, education, and mathematics. At last there is a unifying framework that suspends long-held differences between science and art, and between external reality and internal belief." (Paul Pangaro, "New Order From Old: The Rise of Second-Order Cybernetics and Its Implications for Machine Intelligence", 1988)
"[management by objectives] has become one more way to make organizations behave like machines." (Julien Phillips, "Success", 1988)
"The real definition of a supercomputer is a machine that is just one generation behind the problems it is asked to solve." (Neil Lincoln, Time, 1988)
"If machines knew as much about each other as we know about each other (even in our privacy), the ecology of machines would be indomitable." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict." (James Gleick, “What Just Happened: A chronicle from the information frontier”, 2002)
"But intelligence is not just a matter of acting or behaving intelligently. Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent. A moment's reflection proves this: You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding. Ignoring what goes on in your head and focusing instead on behavior has been a large impediment to understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines." (Jeff Hawkins, "On Intelligence", 2004)
"When a machine manages to be simultaneously meaningful and surprising in the same rich way, it too compels a mentalistic interpretation. Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there are programmers who, in principle, have a mechanical interpretation. But even for them, that interpretation loses its grip as the working program fills its memory with details too voluminous for them to grasp." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith." (Peter Watts, "Blindsight", 2006)
"Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind", 2006)
"The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful." (Jaron Lanier, "You Are Not a Gadget", 2010)
"The architecture - the mind - is knitting together. It’s sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know something, while the secret is to create machines that don’t know something." (Scott Hutchins, "A Working Theory of Love", 2012)
"Artificial intelligence is a concept that obscures accountability. Our problem is not machines acting like humans - it's humans acting like machines." (John Twelve Hawks, "Spark", 2014)
"A computer is a general-purpose machine. It takes its instructions from memory, and one can change the computation it performs by putting different instructions in the memory. Instructions and data are indistinguishable except by context; one person’s instructions are another person’s data." (Brian W Kernighan, "Understanding the Digital World", 2017)
"The good news is that a computer is a general-purpose machine, capable of performing any computation. Although it only has a few kinds of instructions to work with, it can do them very fast, and it can largely control its own operation. The bad news is that it doesn’t do anything itself unless someone tells it what to do, in excruciating detail. A computer is the ultimate sorcerer’s apprentice, able to follow instructions tirelessly and without error, but requiring painstaking accuracy in the specification of what to do." (Brian W Kernighan, "Understanding the Digital World", 2017)
"Machines can do many things, but they cannot create meaning. They cannot answer these questions for us. Machines cannot tell us what we value, what choices we should make. The world we are creating is one that will have intelligent machines in it, but it is not for them. It is a world for us." (Paul Scharre, "Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War", 2018)
"If we don't truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves." (Douglas Rushkoff, "Team Human", 2019)
"Our machines are helpers, not decision makers. Their insights are not the final word in the discussion, merely the work of our most nimble observers who can ramp up time spent on analysis by factors that our counterparts even a generation ago would have a hard time believing." (Kate Strachnyi, "ColorWise: A Data Storyteller’s Guide to the Intentional Use of Color", 2023)
"A learning machine is any device whose actions are influenced by past experiences." (Nils Nilsson)
"Every machine has artificial intelligence. And the more advanced a machine gets, the more advanced artificial intelligence gets as well. But, a machine cannot feel what it is doing. It only follows instructions - our instructions - instructions of the humans. So, artificial intelligence will not destroy the world. Our irresponsibility will destroy the world." (Abhijit Naskar)
"Replacing workers on their present jobs with machines is not the major function of automation. Its greater promise is its ability to do new things, to create new products, new services and new jobs, and to meet the increasing requirements of a growing population." (David Sarnoff)
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