Quotes About Technology

The Bush administration, meanwhile, played the part of the free-spending venture capitalist of that same heady era. Whereas in the nineties the goal was to develop the killer application, the "next new new thing," and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now it was to come up with a new "search and nail" terrorist-catching technology and sell it to the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon.

When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

And it most certainly doesn't help that we are trying to navigate this civilizational crisis at a moment when some of the most brilliant minds of our time are devoting vast energies to figuring out ever-more-ingenious tools to keep us running around in digital circles in search of the next dopamine hit.

Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us. —Richard Thomas, U.K. information commissioner, November 2006

incomprehensible machinery working somewhere out of sight, keeping us all alive, suspended out of the world.

Today, women have access to the technological capacity to do anything to our bodies in the struggle for beauty, but we have yet to evolve a mentality beyond the old rules, to let them imagine that this combat among women is not inevitable. Surgeons can now do anything. We have not yet reached the age in which we can defend ourselves with an unwillingness to have anything done. This is a dangerous time. New possibilities for women quickly become new obligations.

The sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, including advocates for 'adult' material such as Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein, represented porn to us as a great social radicalizer. But a nation of masturbating people who are looking at screens rather than at one another - who are consuming sex like any other product and who are rewiring their brains to find less and less abandon and joy in one another's arms, and to bond more and more with pixels - is a subjugated, not a liberated, population.

everyone everywhere suddenly was to 'distance learn,' that awkward, heartless neologism

This is the reason why a favorite buzzword in tech CEO circles is "disruptive." The primary thing every digital company wants to "disrupt" is a human society from which they are not profiting. The more that tech platforms and policies are able to shut down human community, and restrict the freedom of humans, the wealthier the Big Tech corporations become.

Driving all human interaction onto Zoom and other not-always secure platforms was not only a way to harvest all our data, it was a way to ensure (as face-to-face human connection withered and died) that what passes for intimacy and connection in the future will increasingly be online.

We are relentlessly encouraged by tech companies to think of their technology as enabling human processes, making human actions more efficient. Do your bookkeeping better! Find a restaurant more easily! Talk to a loved one far away! In fact, the business models of most tech giants, and especially social media giants, most thrive when they have replaced human experience and human actions. And now they have moved on to suppressing human experience and human actions.

As CEO of a tech company, I knew exactly why a digital version was "necessary" and the ill that fact boded. I did all I could to warn people that it signaled the potential end of human liberty. In a video that went viral, I explained that digital as opposed to paper "vaccine passports" could require endless "updates" to stay valid. How did I know this? Because a digital product can be made to shut off.

It is not unreasonable to look forward to a time when we shall see without eyes, hear without ears and talk without tongues.

Careful imitation could also explain why hand axes managed to stay so similar to each other for over a million years. If Homo erectus simply looked over old hand axes to guess how to make them, they would have accidentally introduced little variations to their craft. Over a few thousand years, those mismatches would have caused the hand ax to drift far away from its original shape.

The program, known as T4, would ultimately claim 200,000 lives. It operated on a scale so far beyond what the Nazis had attempted before that they had to invent new technology for the slaughter—including gas chambers. McKim's eugenic dream had become real.

We have the technology right now to effectively eradicate Huntington's disease from the planet, along with many other genetic disorders. But the messy realities of human existence--of economics, emotions, politics, and the rest--override the technological possibilities.

Al fin y al cabo, ¿qué clase de ciencia es ésa, capaz de poner un hombre en la luna pero incapaz de poner un pedazo de pan en la mesa de cada ser humano?

Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.

what sort of technology is this that can send a man to the moon but can't put a piece of bread on every human being's table?" "Perhaps the problem doesn't lie in the technology, but in those who decide how to make use of it," I suggested.

The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.

Del resto, che razza di scienza è quella che porta un uomo sulla Luna, ma non è in grado di garantire un pezzo di pane a tutti gli essere umani?

Americans are inventing something called television, which will be like the cinema, only at home. There'll be no more need for books, or churches, or anything.

A televisão, amigo Daniel, é o Anticristo, e digo-lhe que bastarão três ou quatro gerações para que as pessoas não saibam nem dar peidos por sua conta...

Kakva je to znanost koja može ?ovjeka poslati na Mjesec, a ne može staviti komad kruha na stol svakog ?ovjeka?