30 Automation Quotes

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

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.

The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask.

To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham. :-)

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary person.

In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue. Both systems are developing into managerial societies, their inhabitants well fed, well clad, having their wishes satisfied, and not having wishes that cannot be satisfied. Men are increasingly automatons, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines; there reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it.

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

OOPS! You naughty creature! You didn't run Configure with sh! I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you...

About three decades ago, when I needed to purchase some office equipment, chiefly steel filing cabinets, I was amused by a firm whose computer, having been informed that R.P. Oliver was the purchasing agent for R.P. Oliver, offered the former a secret 'kick back' of 20% if he would buy their products at the expense of the latter. Another firm offered the purchasing agent a 'complimentary' woman's mink jacket, which would be sent with his compliments to 'any address,' thus tactfully permitting him to choose between his wife and his doxy. That would have been good business, had the computers been operated by someone with intelligence enough to notice the odd coincidence between the name of the purchasing agent and the name of the owner to be exploited.

I got up one morning, couldn't find my socks, so I called Information. She said, 'Hello, Information.' I said, 'I can't find my socks.' She said, 'They're behind the couch.' And they were!

Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable.

The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more. Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.

Every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machines.

It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules.

Whenever logical processes of thought are employed- that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove- there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.

There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station.

The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?

Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!

Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate 'comprehensivlty.' Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.

Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure.