Quotes About Technology

El asunto es que la gente no se vea obligada a recorrer una cadena de mando —indicó uno de los técnicos de Intel, Ted Hoff—. Si uno necesita hablar con un gerente en concreto, va y habla con él.

Most of us someday will have detection devices in our home that will allow us to check for viruses and many other conditions.

Advances fed on one another, occurring almost simultaneously and spontaneously, at Harvard and MIT and Princeton and Bell Labs and an apartment in Berlin and even, most improbably but interestingly, in a basement in Ames, Iowa.

La esperanza es que, dentro de no muchos años, el cerebro humano y las máquinas computadoras estén unidos de un modo muy estrecho —escribió—, y que la asociación resultante piense como ningún cerebro humano lo haya hecho jamás y procese datos de un modo nunca atisbado por las máquinas de gestión de la información que conocemos hoy.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.11 Empezaba así: Me gusta pensar (¡y cuanto antes, mejor!) en un prado cibernético donde mamíferos y ordenadores vivan juntos en mutua armonía programada como el agua pura tocando el cielo despejado.

Si alguna vez surge una raza mentalmente sobrehumana —dijo en cierta ocasión Edward Teller, el creador de la bomba de hidrógeno—, sus miembros se parecerán a Johnny von Neumann.

One odd result of allowing super-enhancements could be that children will become like iPhones: a new version will come out every few years with better features and apps. Will children as they age feel that they are becoming obsolete? That their eyes don't have the cool triple-lens enhancements that are engineered into the latest version of kids? Fortunately, these are questions we can ask for amusement but not for an answer.

Walter Isaacson

Walter J. Boyne

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word.

Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness.

We're a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don't meet face-to-face much, and when we do there's a dematerialized feeling, as though only half of our molecules are present.

Something about the structure of my brain, its associative, porous, open-endedness, was defenseless against the ever-enlarging Web. Every video, news story, photo, email, stock chart, sexy picture, and five-day weather forecast was an enticement to step into the forest, and once I was two or three bread crumbs down the path, the witches had me, I was in their oven.

The word hear will gain a new significance, while write will fall into disuse. And really, what will writing become when no one can read? And what will the future generations think of writing? Like we think of hieroglyphics, no doubt.

Techno-anarcho-terrorism

A big part of my life was spent getting the keys for or driving my car. My constant friend was the radio, and most of my conversations were not face-to-face but side by side in the front seat or through the rearview mirror of some jalopy that I would drive until it gave out and I had to buy a new one. I was like some kind of futuristic hermit crab being carried by my temporary husk from place to place rather than feeling the sun on my head or my feet on the ground.

The African villager with a solar powered smartphone has more access to more information than Louis XIV in the halls of Versailles.

Predicting the long-term economics of companies that operate in fast-changing industries is simply far beyond our perimeter.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly. Build an eye.

Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky. Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.

Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it's way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter.

ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT