Quotes About Technology

Unfortunately, even though Thomas Nagel would love it, technology today does not permit us to truly understand how different organisms experience the world. Often it is even difficult for us to understand our own perception of the world. The best we can do to empirically understand the experience of others, both animals and people, is to use behavioral and brain-activity measurements.

nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.

It's not that nuclear energy never kills. It's that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear's known total death toll is just over

Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat.

The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on.

We're moving towards such a strange time.A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress

How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he'd been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn't spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.

Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs.

Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job.

We no longer live addicted to speech; having lost our senses, now we are going to lose language, too. We will be addicted to data, naturally. Not data that comes from the world, or from language, but encoded data. To know is to inform oneself. Information is becoming our primary and universal addiction.

With their cell phone, they have access to all people; with GPS, to all places; with the Internet, to all knowledge. They inhabit a topological space of neighborhoods, whereas we lived in a metric space, coordinated by distances.

The result may be a realignment of our socio-political landscape by the advent of a fifth power—the power of data—which is independent of the four other powers: legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and the media.

The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes... One can mass-produce hardware and increase it's power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain.

The Pentagon has been looking into the possibility of developing "smart dust," dust-sized particles that have tiny sensors inside that can be sprayed over a battlefield to give commanders real-time information. In the future it is conceivable that "smart dust" might be sent to the nearby stars.

It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.

Already physicists are doing the basic calculations necessary to make an MRI machine fit into a cell phone.

Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields.

your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969.

The point is: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time. That's the Cave Man Principle.

Someday in the next thirty years, very quietly one day we will cease to be the brightest things on Earth. –JAMES MCALEAR

As in the movie The Matrix, we might one day be able to download memories and skills using computers.

You might one day be able to send the experience of dancing the tango, bungee jumping, or skydiving to the people on your e-mail list. Not just physical activity, but emotions and feelings as well might be sent via brain-to-brain communication.

Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, once declared, "I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines.

I. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. II. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. III. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S THREE LAWS