300 tons of magnets to focus the protons into a narrow beam. ibid.
A shape-shifting body, atomic computing, powering a brain that might outsmart our own: the rise of the machines may be closer than you think. Michio Kaku, Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible s1e9: How to Build a Sci-Fi Robot, Science 2010
I’m about to fuse together flesh and blood with machines and computers. Prepare for a white knuckle ride as I build the ultimate cyborg army … Cyborgs are the perfect fusion of man and machine. Michio Kaku, Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible s2e9: Cyborg Army
Imagine a world ruled by machines where humanity takes second place. Or worse still, has been wiped out. This is more than just sci-fi fantasy: the rise of the machines is coming. Michio Kaku, Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible s2e10: AI Uprising
If we shift toward a model in which we are determining the onset of disease in time for therapy to be effective we will change outcomes. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes, 2019
Elizabeth has raised more than $400 million; the company is valued at $9 billion. ibid. observer
Nestled in the foothills above Silicon Valley there is a 700-acre plot of land called the Stanford Research Park … In the fall of 2014 she [Holmes] moved her bio-tech start-up Theranos to the research park. The company employed 800 people and was valued at nearly $10 billion: 4 years later it was worth less than zero. ibid. commentary
The value of the story: this compelling tale of divining hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood. ibid.
She had a policy of controlling demonstrations and tightly guarding access to the Edison prototypes. ibid.
It was a mess inside. ibid. company worker
Then after a while people became paranoid of one another. (Invention & Fraud & Con & Company & Machine & Blood) ibid. worker
With the Walgreens rollout, the problems at Therenos were magnifying. ibid.
Their downfall was when they started giving us results that were not matching up with other labs. ibid. woman
Internally, we had so little faith in these tests but were still resulting them on patients. ibid. lab technician
Nothing works. We’re on a sinking ship. It’s a lie. ibid. worker
I knew that most of their blood tests were run on commercial analysers. ibid. John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal
In 2018 Theranos dissolved. Elizabeth and Sunny were charged with conspiracy and fraud. They pleaded not guilty. ibid.
Inside the Nazi war machine, travelling across Europe, I’ll explore the extraordinary machines they produced and uncover rare archive to understand who built them, how they evolved, and why their technically brilliant designs were militarily flawed. Nazi War Machines: Secrets Uncovered I: Luftwaffe, James Holland reporting, Channel 4 2019
The magnificent fighter planes no rookie could fly. ibid.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, the Luftwaffe was without doubt the finest air force in the entire world. Just five years later it was no longer an effective fighting force. ibid.
The wunder-weapon that cost more than the creation of the atomic bomb. ibid.
Their principle fighter was the Messerschmitt 909. It made its first flight in 1935. ibid.
One of the best fighter planes of the War – the Foke-Wulf 190. ibid.
The power of the Panzers … I’ll uncover the truth behind Hitler’s fearsome Panzer army, and reveal the Nazi’s passion for over-engineering … This wasn’t just tanks but a massive formation of motorised infantry, artillery and reconnaissance vehicles. For Adolf Hitler the Panzer division was his key to victory. Nazi War Machines: Secrets Uncovered II: The Panzers, James Holland reporting, Channel 4 2019
The German army could adapt and come up with some ingenious solutions … by using all the materials they had available. ibid.
His propaganda machine … The next generation of Panzers would be altogether much bigger and more powerful and most definitely designed and built in Germany. ibid.
The U-boats that were floating bombs: a journey through the heart of the Nazi war machine. In this episode I’ll be going to the depths of the Wolf packs, Germany’s U-boat army, a force that threatened Britain’s survival like no other. Nazi War Machines: Secrets Uncovered III: U-boats
At the start of the Second World War, Britain ruled the waves: the Royal Navy was the largest and most powerful seaborne force in the world. ibid.
His notion of a navy was a grandiose fleet of massive battleships that could take on the Royal Navy on the high seas. After all, where’s the fun in launching U-boats when you could be smashing champagne bottles against giant battleships. ibid.
Away for weeks at a time: the smell of this place must have been absolutely horrendous: the sweat, oil, rotten food, a really physically incredibly tough environment on which to live and try to fight a war. Operating in wolf-packs, the U-boats targeted Britain’s lifeline: the merchant ships supplying goods and materials from the United States and Britain’s colonies from around the world. The wolf-packs were staggeringly successful. ibid.
Small mass-produced vessels: the midget submarine … These midget subs were soon to prove more dangerous to their crews than the enemy. ibid.
Some 60% of these were lost. ibid.
Something that could change the face of the war … This is U-boat 2540 … a type 21. ibid.
The weapons that couldn’t cope with mud or sand … The myth I grew up with was that German kit was best … Nazi quality control delayed vital weapons production: it is just an astonishing waste of time and money and effort. Nazi War Machines: Secrets Uncovered IV: Weaponry
Interference from the very top meant a game-changing weapon failed to reach the front line. And what they needed was just a little bit of firepower. ibid.
The bedrock of any fighting force is its infantry … Walter P38: smaller … cheaper to produce … with a range of thirty metres … One of the defining weapons of the German army in World War II: the devastating machine gun … Even the humble rifle was so finely crafted it couldn’t cope with ice, mud or sand in battle conditions. ibid.
I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions. Charles Darwin
The aim of the Bolsheviks was to transform the people they ruled into what they called ‘scientific beings’, people able to understand and control the machines of the modern world rather than become enslaved to them. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box I: The Engineer’s Plot: A Fable From the Age of Science, BBC 1992
This is a story about the rise of machines. And our belief in the balance of nature. How the idea of the ecosystem was invented. How it inspired us. And how it wasn’t even true. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace II: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Networks, BBC 2011
In the mass democracies of the west a new ideology has risen up. We have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be replaced by self-organising networks. ibid.
This is the story of the rise of the dream of the self-organising system. And the strange machine fantasy of nature that underpins it. ibid.
It was part of what [Arthur] Tansley called, ‘the great universal law of equilibrium’. All these systems, he wrote, are constantly tending towards positions of balance or equilibrium … There was an underlying mechanism that regulated nature as if it were a machine. But it was only an hypothesis, ibid.
Cybernetics saw human beings not as individuals in charge of their own destiny but as components in systems. At its heart, Cybernetics was a computer’s idea of the world. And from that perspective there was no difference between human beings and machines. They were just nodes in networks acting and reacting to flows in information. ibid.
Cybernetics transformed the idea of the eco-system because it seemed to explain how the system stabilises. ibid.
‘I will make my life an experiment to search for the principles that govern the universe.’ ibid. Buckminster Fuller
What began to rise up in the 1970s was the idea that we and everything else on the planet are connected together in complex webs and networks. Out of that were going to come epic visions of connectivity. ibid.
Eco-systems did not tend towards stability but the very opposite was true. That nature far from seeking equilibrium was always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable change. ibid.
This is a story about the rise of machines. And why no-one believes you can change the world for the better any more. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace III: The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey
Bill Hamilton: Genes were not like people; they were like machines, tiny calculating engines, that could work out the mathematical best outcome. And that explained altruism. ibid.