Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
Interpretation
Machines serve us, but they can also lead to the abdication of human judgment and responsibility.
This quote reflects on the relationship between humans and machines, emphasizing that while machines can relieve us from tedious tasks, the real danger lies in our willingness to relinquish our decision-making and moral responsibilities to them. It warns that blindly following mechanical principles can corrupt our values and judgment, particularly in organizational settings.
In practice
This quote could be used in a technology ethics seminar to discuss the importance of maintaining human judgment in decision-making.
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect
Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.
Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.
I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?
The hope of internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
A low-carbon, clean energy economy can be an engine of growth for decades to come.
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