Thoughts on machines

Image: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur

Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.
Steve Wozniak

Technology is the knack for so arranging the world that we do not experience it.
Max Frisch

Why is it that drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?
Clifford Stoll

We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works.
Douglas Adams

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
Frank Lloyd Wright

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.
Jeremy Irons

The machine threatens all achievement.
Rainer Maria Rilke

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
BF Skinner

I know there’s a proverb that says ‘To err is human,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.
Agatha Christie

I could make tools if I had tools to make them with.
Eli Whitney

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test.
Robert M Pirsig

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means of going backward.
Aldous Huxley

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso

One has to look out for engineers—they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.
Marcel Pagnol

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
Alan Turing