“Historically, the developement of machines had amplified man's ability to destroy.”

The cloud walker (1973)

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Edmund Cooper52

British writer 1926–1982

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“To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Seventh State of the Union (3 December 1907)
1900s

“It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

Source: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 16

“If intellectual power is to be developed, we must somehow construct amplifiers for intelligence — devices that, supplied with a little intelligence, will emit a lot.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Ashby. "Design for an intelligence amplifier." Automata studies (1956): 215-234. p. 216

“There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

15 February 1788, Third Day, volume x, p. 54
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“Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, and what is lacking is the clear vision of what should be done... What needs to be done is that fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new language we must have a new reality... A new reality will generate a new language, a new language will fix a new reality, and make it part of this reality.

“We must remember that machines do not, as in the capitalist system, compete with workers or enslave workers. Workers must view machines as the liberators of their force. Machines are placed at the service of workers as soon as the exploitation of man by man stops. And that is what we are striving for: we are trying to turn machines into liberating instruments of peasants, so they will have more time for leisure, so they will have more time to study, to develop in every sense, to achieve the most important thing we must achieve: individuals developed to the full, this is the aim we are all struggling for.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech at the National Sugar Plenary Meeting in Camagüey, February 9, 1963 Ernesto Che Guevera. Escritos y discursos. Op. cit., vol. 7.
On Automation (1963)

“If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that […] if that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws.”

Orrin Hatch (1934) United States Senator from Utah

Destroy 'pirate' PCs, says politician, BBC News, 2003-06-18, 2006-08-22 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2999780.stm,

“And as it spreads, will it spread the ability to use machines, as we do, without understanding them?”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect
Context: You see how increasingly the only way we in the advanced industrial nations, with our bewildering technology network, can survive, is by selling bewilderment and dependence on technology to the rest of the world. Or is it not bewilderment and dependence, but a healthier wealthier better way of living than the old way? And, yet, whether or not you dress up technology to look local, the technology network is the same. And as it spreads, will it spread the ability to use machines, as we do, without understanding them?

“The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions.”

Wilhelm Reich book Listen, Little Man!

Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.

“The recoil from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural developments—even those developments that most closely derive from the organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had nothing to learn from mechanism.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

“Historically, the developement of machines had amplified man's ability to destroy.”

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Edmund Cooper52

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