Quotes About Technology

Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down.

You guys are of the belief that everything worth knowing is already on the Internet. There is ten times more information in libraries than on the Web. Probably a thousand times. You two go way beyond Google searches

In 1892, mine owner L. L. Nunn had hired the electrical wizard Nikola Tesla to build the world's first alternating-current power

induction motor, radio control, wireless communications, spark plugs. It was said that his ideas and inventions came to him fully formed in a flash of inspiration.

radioman Schmidt says he's picking up a faint signal.

You should see the latest computer-generated movies featuring the long-gone old stars with the new. I've watched the video of Arizona Sunset at least a dozen times. Who plays the leads? Humphrey Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts, and Tom Cruise. It's so real, you'd swear they all acted together on the set.

Intruders can rig your private elevator easier than stealing a Mercedes-Benz.

drove his new customized Tesla

Julia tensed as she looked through the steering wheel of the Model J Duesenberg and saw the needle creep up and waver at seventy miles an hour. This car doesn't have seat belts. They didn't believe in them in 1929.

Em Samarcanda, dois séculos antes da invenção do telescópio, Ulug Beg registava a trajetória de mil e dezoito estrelas e recalculava o ano estelar com uma diferença de segundos em relação aos resultados obtidos atualmente pela eletrónica.

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

In our modern age, cell phone technology permits us to record the constant brutality that occurs all around us; we experience not an uptick in violence but a new kind of witnessing.

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?

I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

The publicity of the present day causes that no sooner is a discovery or an invention made than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts.

We were a made-for-TV family. Every new channel added to our lineup, every magnificent home-entertainment advance increased the possibility that we wouldn't have to talk to one another.

Numbers can't be racist, right? But the data can be dumb or wrong, though, and if you feed shit into the computer, it gives you shit right back.

He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn't count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn't figure out how many crosses to go into the ground.

Curious: At the very moment modern technology annuls all frontiers and distances (flying, wireless, television, economic interdependance), the most extreme nationalism is raging.

My son Rafi is enchanted with cyberspace. But we are not disembodied mind or spirit, we are our bodies - cruising the Internet won't teach us that. It may even trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. Gardening teaches us differently. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming, I mean the kind of gardening that any one of us can do with his hands and feet and the simplest tools.

progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker.

And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time.

Worshipping technique at the expense of encounter involves making man not only a mere thing, but also a mere means to an end.