Quotes from Steven Levy

Our chips keep getting faster, and our data rates keep climbing, but at the end of the day - or worse, by mid-afternoon - those power meters on our screens inevitably turn to red.

Amazon is definitely serious about delivering its goods by an autonomous air force.

No company has embraced the liberating aspects of the Internet as a 'new marketplace of ideas' more than the search giant Google.

Google serves all of humanity with information within milliseconds.

The iPhone was such a phenomenon that even the humble journalists chosen for an early look were thrust into a spotlight.

As an open system, Android is not under the tight control of its creator, Google.

Is it possible for Apple or anyone else to rule in the mobile realm the way Microsoft did on the desktop? The way to do this is to go mass-market with a device that can do anything the others can do.

For many years, when people described how the Internet worked - whether they were talking about shopping, communicating, or starting a business there - they inevitably invoked a single metaphor. The Internet, said just about everybody, was a contemporary incarnation of the wild, wild West.

Through a mix of market forces and regulation, we've brought civilization to the electronic provinces.

Even though chess isn't the toughest thing that computers will tackle for centuries, it stood as a handy symbol for human intelligence. No matter what human-like feat computers perform in the future, the Deep Blue match demands an indelible dot on all timelines of AI progress.

Facebook has never been shy about its ambitions.

Fast, cheap, abundant broadband is a fantastic economic accelerator, enabling breakout businesses and kick-starting new industries.

Technology writers are seldom subject to frenzied, Beatlemania-esque paroxysms of public attention. June 29, 2007, was the exception. I was in the wrong place - Apple's Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan - with the right device. The iPhone.

Barack Obama was a president who understood not only how technology could transform the way government services worked but also technology itself. He got it.

Since the iPhone, the most transformative products have not been gadgets but services. Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat have changed lives, but they didn't launch to massive fanfare.

Just as the cable revolution overturned broadcast, the net is destined to become the dominant mode of video, both in terms of transit and programming.

The fact that biological, or 'natural' rules might help in the creation of a computer generated work of art is interesting, but even a wonderful work of art made in this fashion isn't the same as a person, with all his or her experiences and emotions involved, making art.

Steve Ballmer never used to be someone who let facts speak for themselves. In the 1990s, he was the hyper-energetic Microsoft exec yelling 'Developers! Developers! Developers!' at an all-hands meeting in Safeco field.

This paradox of vision - the genius of youthful ignorance - is nothing new. Had Bill Gates not been in diapers in the early days of computer software, he might have understood that there could never be a market for consumer software - but the 19-year-old Gates went ahead and cofounded Microsoft.

Normally, my digital peregrinations take me to destinations like Facebook, YouTube, and boingboing.net.

As technology tries to maintain its dizzying ascent, one dead weight has kept its altitude in check: the battery.

Computer technology is so built into our lives that it's part of the surround of every artist.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution. (OK, it doesn't take a genius, or even a politician, to figure out that big changes are afoot when we have a medium that lets someone throw up a virtual storefront on the Web and instantly gain access to the global market.)

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.