Themes

Can a machine think?

Whether calculation, play, or composition by a machine counts as thought, or only imitates it.

Descartes, Cordemoy, La Mettrie, Thiry, Poe, Menabrea, King, Butler, Babbage, Jevons, l'Isle-Adam, Quevedo, Rosenblueth, Hartree, Jefferson, Turing

1637–1950 · 17 works · 3 lang.

Is the human being a machine?

Whether human action is fully determined by mechanism, and what is left of freedom if it is.

Malebranche, La Mettrie, Hume, Thiry, Reid, Owen, Mill, Büchner, Biran, Hodgson, Butler, Huxley, Clifford, Carpenter, Bois-Reymond, Ferri, Bergson, James, Haeckel, Darrow, Eddington

1674–1928 · 21 works · 4 lang.

What separates the living from the mechanical?

Whether organisms are complex machines or have a principle that no machine can have.

Descartes, Wolff, Blumenbach, Kant, Bichat, Lotze, Bouillier, Marx, Bernard, Roux, Morgan, Bergson, Driesch, Loeb, Haldane

1664–1916 · 16 works · 4 lang.

Should reasoning be handed to mechanical procedure?

Whether disputes can be settled by calculation, and what is lost when rules replace judgment.

Aristotle, Huang Zongxi, Pascal, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Blackstone, Condillac, Stafford et al., Trollope, Galton, Jevons, Jhering, Leibniz, Carroll, Gény, Hilbert, Flavius, Poincaré, Pound, Binet, Münsterberg, Terman, Lippmann, Turing

c. 340 BCE–1936 · 24 works · 7 lang.

Will machines evolve beyond humanity?

Whether machines will develop along their own line and displace the people who made them.

Aristotle, Carlyle, Butler, Marx, Pitt-Rivers, Kapp, Eliot, Lafargue, Wilde, Bergson, Forster, Čapek

c. 330 BCE–1920 · 14 works · 5 lang.

Should humans use machines to overcome their limits?

Whether technology should be used to defeat death, the body, or human nature.

Descartes, Locke, Swift, Hume, Reid, Godwin, Condorcet, Malthus, Poe, Fedorov, Metchnikoff, Baum, Čapek, Belyaev, Bernal, Jones

1637–1931 · 16 works · 4 lang.

Does machine work free the worker or degrade them?

Whether machinery relieves toil or reduces the worker to a part of the machine.

Smith, Sismondi, Ricardo, Babbage, Ure, Tocqueville, Bastiat, Mill, Ruskin, Marx, George, Lafargue, Bellamy, Kropotkin, Veblen, Gandhi, Taylor, Ford

1776–1922 · 18 works · 4 lang.

Does a mechanized life make people mechanical?

Whether routine, speed, and the city turn people into automata.

Loyola, Rousseau, Kant, Franklin, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Thoreau, Dickens, Mill, Dostoevsky, James, Tolstoy, Bennett, Dewey, Zamyatin

1553–1924 · 17 works · 5 lang.

Does relying on machines weaken human capacities?

Whether tools that do our work leave us unable to do it ourselves.

Plato, Napier, Pascal, Leibniz, Malebranche, Locke, Watts, Johnson, Rousseau, Kant, Hugo, Babbage, Emerson, Thoreau, Butler, Müller, Fitch, Wilde, Kropotkin, Smith, Forster, Gandhi, Fujisawa

c. 370 BCE–1912 · 23 works · 6 lang.

Can people control what they make?

Whether a made thing can escape its maker, and who is responsible when it does.

Bacon, Shelley, Ure, Butler, Zhuangzi, Conference, Wells, Čapek, Russell, Haldane, Wiener

1627–1947 · 12 works · 4 lang.

Do artificial beings have moral standing?

Whether a made being can be wronged, and whether using one is a kind of slavery.

Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Filmer, Locke, Voltaire, Bentham, Shelley, Huxley, l'Isle-Adam, Salt, Čapek

c. 330 BCE–1920 · 12 works · 4 lang.

Is the machine divine, idolatrous, or providential?

Whether machines are objects of worship, instruments of God's plan, or false gods.

Bacon, Saint-Simon, Carlyle, Walker, Hawthorne, Arnold, Whitman, Carpenter, Adams, Forster, Haldane, Berdyaev

1620–1933 · 12 works · 4 lang.

Is machinery the measure of civilization?

Whether technical power shows that a people is advanced, or is a narrower thing than civilization.

Babbage, Macaulay, Feng Guifen, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Morgan, Ferry, Zhang Zhidong, Kidd, Belloc, Wells, Pearson, Yan Fu, Hobson, Bergson, Gandhi, Veblen, Tagore, Spengler, Césaire

1832–1950 · 19 works · 6 lang.

Is society a machine, and should it be?

Whether governments and nations are mechanisms, and what happens to the people inside them.

Hobbes, Kant, Schiller, Müller, Hegel, Carlyle, Thoreau, Spencer, Wilson, Tolstoy, Lenin, Weber

1651–1919 · 12 works · 3 lang.

Are tools part of us or foreign to us?

Whether technology extends the human body and mind or stands against them.

Rousseau, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Marx, Butler, Kapp, Bergson, Henry et al., Freud, Merleau-Ponty

1755–1945 · 12 works · 3 lang.

Can an artificial being be loved?

Whether love for a made being is real or a deception.

Ovid, Descartes, Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Hoffmann, l'Isle-Adam, Rilke, Freud, Rey

c. 8 CE–1938 · 10 works · 4 lang.