Quotes About Technology

The obsidian flake and the silicon chip are struck by the light of the same campfire that has passed from hand to hand since the human mind began.

Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.

Are we using digital computers to sequence, store, and better replicate our own genetic code, thereby optimizing human beings, or are digital computers optimizing our genetic code—and our way of thinking—so that we can better assist in replicating them?

in other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

Humans were still in the loop but no longer in control.

VON NEUMANN MADE a deal with "the other party" in 1946. The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs. This seems to have turned out well enough so far, because, contrary to von Neumann's expectations, it was the computers that exploded, not the bombs.

The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time. "It is an irony of fate," observes Françoise Ulam, "that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.

Software was born. Numerical codes would be granted full control—including the power to modify themselves.1

Google sought to gauge what people were thinking, and became what people were thinking.

You press the button, we do the rest.

We have come a long way from sod huts and muddy boots to an economy that produces billions of dollars' worth of soap. And we may be learning what Mark Twain meant: "Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.

Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.

The foundation of any empire is not guns, something that Hitler and Stalin never grasped. It is money, and the envy that brings. But more important than money or guns is the technology that represents the future and the culture that speaks of being contemporary. All lasting empires are empires of the mind and soul, empires that cause others to crave to emulate them.

In some sense, the military is the most modern part of a developing country.

technology and happiness are intimately linked in American life, to the point that technology is at times a substitute for other types of happiness, such as love and the divine. Americans value those things, but they love cutting-edge technology with a different but real passion.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

In the Google era, Newton's system of the world—one universe, one money, one God—is now in eclipse. His unitary foundation of irreversible physics and his irrefragable golden money have given way to infinite parallel universes and multiple paper moneys manipulated by fiat. Money, like the cosmos, has become relativistic and reversible at will.

Today, on a per capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity.

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen.

The blind spot of AI is that consciousness does not emerge from thought; it is the source of

Even though bitcoin may not, after all, represent the potential for a new gold standard, its underlying technology will unbundle the roles of money. This can finally clarify and enable the necessary distinction between the medium of exchange and the measuring stick. Disaggregated will be all the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft conglomerates)—the clouds of concentrated computing and commerce.