Quotes About Innovation

Look, the media are trapped by changes in the technology and business of their industry.

Michael Swan-wick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction, short-shorts inspired by the periodic table of the elements.

The invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago triggered a revolution in human living that would ultimately lead to cities, commerce, and money—and a dramatic expansion in gambling.

You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance.

A "permissionless" cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is built to be out of anyone's control, wastes incredible amounts of electricity — Bitcoin uses about as much power as all of Austria45 — and would be a completely silly idea for a company to develop as an investment, unless they were maintaining control by other means.

Syd always gets in there.

After all, as we're constantly reminded, the Internet has unleashed all sorts of creative vision and collaborative ingenuity. What it has really brought about is a kind of bizarre inversion of ends and means, where creativity is marshaled to the service of administration rather than the other way around.

Freedom is our ability to make things up just for the sake of being able to do so.

The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that wherever the most exciting new ideas of the next century come from, it will almost certainly be from someplace we don't expect.

Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down.

When and how did we come to believe that creativity was supposed to be painful

For most of the Middle Ages, the economic nerve center of the world economy and the source of its most dramatic financial innovations was neither China nor India, but the West, which, from the perspective of the rest of the world, meant the world of Islam.

all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous:

The Neolithic botanists'] was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of securing a favourable outcome. Their 'laboratory' was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation.

Silicon Valley is in the process of taking aim at health care, education, and the liberal professions as well.

lack of imagination is not itself an argument.

In reality, there's every reason to believe that farming 'reached' California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It's just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labour, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a reclusive, near-deaf, self-taught rural schoolteacher who, working alone and having almost no contact with the wider scientific community, invented ingenious engineering designs for multistage rockets, orbiting space colonies, and interplanetary craft. Though

Tsiolkovsky's most well-known quote expresses this sentiment: "The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not stay in the cradle forever." Awakenings

Now, traveling about twice as far back again in Earth time, back to 542 million years ago, we encounter another sudden massive wave of extinction instigated by runaway biology: The Cambrian substrate revolution, when the texture and chemistry of the seafloor (at that time, the entire habitable surface of the planet) was rapidly remade by a spurt of biological innovation that caused both mass death and fantastic new evolutionary opportunity. This

cities will be smarter, greener places. Over the centuries, we've made a lot of progress in learning how to urbanize. We invented plumbing and sanitation systems, learned not to stain our cities brown with coal ash, realized we don't want polluted urban rivers. We are still learning how to live well in cities. I bet twenty-second-century cities will be nice places to live. Our

We need visions of a future in which we have applied our infinite creativity to the task of living on a finite world, where we have embraced our role, become comfortable and proficient as planet-shapers, and learned to use our technological skills to enhance the survival prospects not just of humanity but of all life on Earth. My name for this vision is Terra Sapiens, or "Wise Earth." A

Okay, engineering is not quite the right word, as it implies some larger degree of understanding than we have. We are perhaps engineering Earth only in the way that your infant is "engineering" your home media system when she sticks cookies in the DVD slot.