Quotes About Innovation

Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.

In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.

But the single most remarkable and defining moment of the past 500 years came at 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945. At that precise second, American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. From that point onward, humankind had the capability not only to change the course of history, but to end it.

The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood.

threat of job losses does not result merely from the rise of infotech. It results from the confluence of infotech with biotech.

other words, while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two.

Since 1789, despite numerous wars, revolutions and upheavals, humans have not managed to conceive of any new value.

And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don't need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.

Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done. Government regulation can successfully block new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative.

so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?

Humans have two types of abilities – physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning, analysing, communicating and above all understanding human emotions.

What happened in the Cognitive Revolution?

Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done.

the internet revolution was directed by engineers more than by political parties.

scientific complex and technological wizardry. All successful late modern empires cultivated scientific research in the hope of harvesting technological innovations, and many scientists spent most of their time working on arms, medicines and machines for their imperial masters.

ever since the Cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs.

This might sound like science fiction, but the world's first clean hamburger was grown from cells—and then eaten—in 2013. It cost $330,000.

Someday we will become something we haven't even yet imagined.

At present, I am particularly excited by "bad taste." I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed "The Work of Art." I wish to play with human feeling, with its "morbidity" in a cold and ferocious manner.

I prefer to shock rather than to bore through repetition.

If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, "This sucks. I'm going to do my own thing.

use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Doesn't it look as though a genius is actually a person who has figured out a different way to think?

Pre-order is the new order