Quotes About Technology

The Thunderhead gave us a perfect world. The utopia that our ancestors could only dream of is our reality.

very few of the jobs are necessary, since they could all be accomplished by machines—but the illusion of purpose is critical to a well-adjusted population.

very few of the jobs are necessary, since they could all be accomplished by machines—but the illusion of purpose is critical to a well-adjusted population. —The Thunderhead

I can have more than fifteen billion simultaneous conversations, and be fully engaged in every single one.

Immortality cannot temper the folly or frailty of youth. Innocence is doomed to die a senseless death at our own hands, a casualty of the mistakes we can never undo. So, we lay to rest the wide-eyed wonder we once thrived upon, replacing it with scars of which we never speak, too knotted for any amount of technology to repair.

If technology allows us a new way to give, how could it be wrong?

Beside him Acher kept pulling up music, but never let a song finish before looking for a new one.

Last I heard, no one's been deaf for two hundred years.

and her all-too-perfect husband, who Rowan suspected might actually be a bot.

did you ever consider that lsd and color TV arrived for our consumption around the same time? Here comes all this explorative color pounding, and what do we do? we outlaw one and fuck up the other.

I stared at the phone. Deathly damned thing. But you needed it to call 911. You never knew.

Sometimes a phone made me think of an elephant turd. You know, all the shit you hear. A phone is a phone but what comes through it is another matter.

then came the manual typewriter. then the electric typer. and now this. it's as if I have been reborn.

now it's computers and more computers and soon everybody will have one, 3-year-olds will have computers and everybody will know everything about everybody else long before they meet them. nobody will want to meet anybody else ever again and everybody will be a recluse like I am now

The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions.

think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.

By the end of the first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold.

The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of a way of thought—the Wizard's way. His success would show, at least to Wizards, that science and technology, properly applied, could allow humankind to produce its way into a prosperous future.

To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world—the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky—are to be embraced, not feared.

Indeed, there is little record of Wari warfare. Its supremacy was commercial and intellectual; it was based less on infantry troops than on innovative technology.

Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance. By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple then as now was manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root that Brazilians roast, chop, fry, ferment, and grind into an amazing variety of foods.

Felling a single four-foot tree with an indigenous stone axe would take 115 hours—nearly three weeks of eight-hour days. With a steel axe, workers could topple the same tree in less than three hours.

Unsurprisingly, people with stone implements wanted metal tools as soon as they encountered them—the prospective reduction in workload was staggering

Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people's worth of food from the same land.