#machines

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#applies #does #existence #go #hidden

Phyllis is one of the tunnel boring machines for Crossrail and one of the most extraordinary characters I met, visiting some of the most exciting infrastructure in Britain. Crossrail is the new railway which will run from West to East right across London. It is the biggest engineering project in Europe - and Phyllis herself is not exactly dainty. ↗

— Evan Davis

#biggest #boring #britain #characters #dainty

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#being #beings #complication #deal #emphasis

Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom. ↗

— Richard Dooling

#bring #building #doom #doorstep #even

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise. ↗

— K. Eric Drexler

#area #comes #engineering #issues #machines

If the machines can take the drudgery out of it and just leave us with the joy of drawing, then that's the best of both worlds - and I'll use those computers! ↗

— Don Bluth

#both #computers #drawing #drudgery #i

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place. ↗

— David R. Brower

#chemicals #farming #fertilizer #first #fuel

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 Turing

#altered #believe #century #contradicted #educated

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. ↗

— Michael Denton

#factory #id #intelligent-design #irreducible-complexity #living-cells

Did you know that the fundamental building blocks of life are not cells, are not DNA are not even carbon but language yeah 'cause DNA is just a four-character language and binary code is a two-character language and what these languages are saying is the very act of revealing, so you reach an X-point when language attains a level of complexity where it begins to fold in upon itself trying to understand itself and this is sentience. Did you know that the entire Library of Congress can be encoded in our DNA because all you have to do is translate a binary system into a four-character system to where you can decode the genes like you're searching a microfiche and if you were to genetically engineer the corpus of human knowledge into our DNA then we'd be able to genetically pass the entire library along from generation to generation like frickin' disease, man. ↗

— Ryan Boudinot

#life