I have been motivated by this idea since I was a kid that if we invented machines that were created in the way that people are - were aware, have free will, inventive machines, machines that would be geniuses - potentially, they could reinvent themselves. They're not just applying it to other things - they could actually redesign themselves.
Machines help us do things more quickly and efficiently, but they can also destroy some community activities. Machines can also throw the weakest people out of work and this would be sad, because their small contribution to the housework or cooking is their way of giving something to the community. People who are capable of doing things very quickly with the help of machines become tremendously busy, always active, in charge of everyone - a bit like machines themselves.
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
When ATM machines came out and people were prosecuted for robbing ATM machines, I don't think anybody thought the banks were against technology because they didn't want their ATM machines lifted.
Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Those machines have no place for empathy. There's billions of dollars being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy.
The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.
Machines are the opium of the masses. If all the machines in England were thrown into the North Sea tomorrow, we should be back in the Garden of Eden. And the weather would probably improve.
We do know that we can set certain algorithms for machines to do certain things - now that may be a simple task. A factory robot that moves one object from here to there. That's a very simple top-down solution. But when we start creating machines that learn for themselves, that is a whole new area that we've never been in before.
You cannot love a car the way you love a horse. The horse brings out human feelings the way machines cannot do. Things like machines may develop or neglect certain things in people ... Machines make our life impersonal and stultify certain elements in us and create an impersonal environment.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Touch-screen voting machines absolutely cannot be relied upon. Our recommendation was optiscan ballots - where you actually have custody of the actual ballots after the ballots have been passed through the computer. That's the most reliable system to use. And people should not use the electronic voting machines. Even electronic voting machines with paper trails can be manipulated.
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
Although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the Universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.
All other species on this planet are gene machines only. They don't imitate at all well; we alone are gene machines and meme machines as well.
If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.
People are not machines, but in all situations where they are given the opportunity, they will act like machines.
Indeed, everything was a shock at the beginning. The wash machines, dryers, dishwashers, garbage disposal machines, juicers, toasters, and yes, the ATM machines. Watching money spilled out of a wall was simply amazing!