Quotes About Technology

Libraries saw the Internet coming and extended a hand. First they set up computer stations for public use; then they offered free Wi-Fi. Now at Central Library and many other libraries around the country, there are kiosks where anyone can borrow a laptop or tablet computer to use for the day, just the way she might borrow a book.

transition from pre-Internet to omnipresent-Internet, and who was successfully rigging the library to sail into the future not as a gigantic, groaning, fusty pile of books but as a sleek ship of information and imagination.

a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.

This was in the early 1990s, the moment when Internet service providers were introduced to the general public, and for the first time in history, the status of libraries as the only and best storehouses of information was challenged. Szabo received his library degree just as people were beginning to wonder whether libraries were viable or even necessary in the newly wired world.

scientists have determined that staring at a smartphone screen for a long period of time induces a form of hypnosis).

In Beijing, about a third of library books are borrowed out of vending machines around the city.

An Elf-Woman went by him, seated in a chair that moved along by itself, humming as it went. An Elf-Man walked by the other way, talking into a—a far-speak, but one that had no leash fastening it to the wall. Two Elf-Women each carried huge bunches of giant, fiercely colored Elvish flowers. And all the time the air twittered and beeped and hissed and buzzed.

couldn't help but think that young man probably has never seen the window crank in a car! That's the handle exclusively used to roll down windows before electric windows existed. My twenty-year-old Miata has window cranks, which, I might add, get the job done quite well.

In Albert Einstein's words, "I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.

For if we are not careful, we may experience one or more perverse realizations of AI technology—situations in which AI fails to make life easier but instead leads to our own suffering or demise, or to the exploitation of other conscious beings.

And if an AI is a conscious being, forcing it to serve us would be akin to slavery.

In the long term, the tables may turn on humans, and the problem may not be what we could do to harm AIs, but what AI might do to harm us.

If superintelligent machines are not conscious, either because it's impossible or because they aren't designed to be, we could be in trouble.

Even if AI surpasses us intellectually, we still may stand out in a crucial dimension: it feels like something to be us.

For instance, if AI cannot be conscious, then if you substituted a microchip for the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, you would end your life as a conscious being.

According to a recent survey, for instance, the most-cited AI researchers expect AI to "carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human" within a 50 percent probability by 2050, and within a 90 percent probability by 2070.

Kurzweil and other transhumanists contend that we are fast approaching a "technological singularity," a point at which AI far surpasses human intelligence and is capable of solving problems we weren't able to solve before, with unpredictable consequences for civilization and human nature.

Luddites broke hundreds of machines and shut down dozens of factories. To the poorest factory workers, Luddites were heroes!

The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.

Technology can do a great deal to make information gathering easier, but it can do little to simplify the gathering of wisdom.

My first job after college was at Magic Quest, an educational software startup company where I was responsible for writing the content. I found that job somewhat accidentally but after working there a few weeks and loving my job, I decided to pursue a career in technology.

Though we do need more women to graduate with technical degrees, I always like to remind women that you don't need to have science or technology degrees to build a career in tech.

Today, most young women are exposed to technology at a very young age, with mobile phones, tablets, the Web or social media. They are much more proficient with technology than prior generations since they use it for all their school work, communication and entertainment.

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to rill in and die for their entertainment?