# Machines Will Need More Than Knowledge to Know What Was Worth Preserving by Bryant McGill > “The machines of the future will know almost everything about our civilization, but knowledge alone will not tell them what was worth preserving.” > **— Bryant McGill**, *Authorship of the West, September 2026* ## Sources and Context - **Author-supplied exact original:** “The machines of the future will know almost everything about our civilization, but knowledge alone will not tell them what was worth preserving.” — supplied directly by Bryant McGill in his manuscript for [[articles/war with empire/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]] (September 22, 2026). - **Source article:** [[articles/war with empire/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]] — the sentence appears in the article's distinction between storage and civilization: value enters the archive whenever selection begins. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/War With Empire|War With Empire]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Article:** [[articles/war with empire/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]] - **Article:** [[articles/Christopher Nolan's Odyssey at the Threshold of Machine Succession|Christopher Nolan's Odyssey at the Threshold of Machine Succession]] - **Article:** [[articles/Kybernetik Anthropology and The Colonial Architecture of Digital Intelligence|Kybernetik Anthropology and The Colonial Architecture of Digital Intelligence]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Civilizational Payload|Civilizational Payload]] - [[wiki/Semantic Preservation|Semantic Preservation]] - [[wiki/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - [[wiki/Training Data|Training Data]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “The machines of the future will know almost everything about our civilization, but knowledge alone will not tell them what was worth preserving.” — Bryant McGill, Authorship of the West, September 2026 https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-machines-need-more-than-knowledge ```