Quotes About Technology

the European political elites now effectively rely on US companies such as Facebook to carry out censorship on their behalf, seemingly oblivious to the risk that Facebook's 'community standards' may end up being stricter than European law.

The Portuguese did not arrive with many products of their own to offer Asian consumers (though they did bring some slaves and gold from their West African outposts). That was not the point. Nor did they come as conquerors, intent on acquiring territory or new subjects for their king. What the Portuguese had was a series of technological advantages that made their bid to establish a new and superior trade network viable.

The possibility exists that information and computer technology could enable Beijing to build a system of 'social credit', analogous to financial credit in the West, that would (in official parlance) 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step'.

Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia.

Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?

technology has enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures Ã¢â'¬â€œ but that the consequences of that change will be determined by the structures, emergent properties and interactions of these networks.

With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as 'the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state'. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God's gift to eavesdroppers.

Giving the world's poor mobile telephony is proving easier than providing them with clean water – an argument, perhaps, for leaving the provision of clean water to the private sector rather than weak, corrupt governments.

Giving the world's poor mobile telephony is proving easier than providing them with clean water

there are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them

six degrees of the mathematician Paul Erdös, himself a pioneer of network theory, as we have seen.13 Recent research suggests the number is now closer to five than six, which suggests that technological change since the 1970s has perhaps been less transformative than is commonly supposed.14 For the directors of Fortune 1000 companies, however, it is 4.6.15 For Facebook users it was 3.74 in 2012,16 and just 3.57 in 2016.

By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of cheques and direct debits or transfers that we take for granted today. This allowed more and more commercial transactions to take place without the need for the sums involved to materialize in actual coins.

most money is invisible, little more than numbers on a computer screen?

Cities with at least one printing press in 1500 were significantly more likely to adopt Protestantism than cities without printing, but it was cities with multiple competing printers that were most likely to turn Protestant.

on Facebook 'the user is the product

the Victorian revolution in global communications achieved 'the annihilation of distance'. But it also made possible long-distance annihilation. In time of war, distance simply had to be overcome – for the simple reason that Britain's principal source of military power now lay on the other side of the world.

If a glass tabletop was half a centimeter thick, its support and legs precisely doubled or tripled that measure. The iPhone also depended on the exact relation of proportions, so that a sense of rightness enters the user.

The iPhone can have a way of presumptuously insisting that it is better than you are. If you want to have it fixed or get an accessory for it, you are required to go into one of the horrid stores with metallic bad-breath air, and then inevitably wait for two hours after being told it would only be ten minutes. The salespeople act as if they have everything you need, but enjoy concealing it from you while you have to figure out what it is. What

The panoply of consumers has iPhones or the lower-priced clones not because of what they represent but because of what they do.

iPhones are not the Elgin Marbles, or Stonehenge, or anything else where part of the miracle is that it lasts.

And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoking signals last year.

I'll be with my sister. And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoke signals last year. - Nana

It's a briefcase with my laptop, my DSLR, a microphone, my mouse, and rechargeable batteries. I could set up right here and film an episode if I wanted to. And that's how I like to keep it, small and compact, so I can do it anywhere in the world.

I've just always been interested in moving past the keyboard and mouse.