Quotes About Technology

We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn't make magic carpets work.

The near future? The future of anything is like some massive weather system on the horizon, pushing out thunderheads all over the place, and it's impossible to predict where the lightning will strike. And in 2011 it's worse than ever.

Look at a Segway and tell me it's not the world's shittiest witch's broomstick. We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn't make magic carpets work.

the future is a product, and you only get to vote with your money now

There are people out there so heavily specialized in wearable technology that they call shirts with networked devices built into them "wearable shirts." They're so deep into their own silo of futurism that they've forgotten how shirts work.

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.

That's what you should be worrying about. Idiots with all the money, plowing it into building a thing just because they can.

Okay. I've either reinvented the solar panel or I've made something for seagulls to fuck in.

People. You're not crazy if there really are robot insects listening to every word you say. Someone said, I fucking told you

In his other hand is a spear made from duct tape, a smashed Nokia phone from 1998 and a selfie stick. Welcome to the future.

take gets beamed back to our servers and skimmed by an algorithm reader, which is a piece of software that's maybe as smart as a puppy. It sits up and barks when something really unusual happens in its field of vision.

Come on," said the Director. "You are all completely mad people who mess around with technology and weird social theory for fun until your brains shit themselves and you fall over. Any of you could have done this.

His quant band was gone, he noticed: he wouldn't be tracking his steps, his blood oxygen, heart rate, local EF field activity, or the five other things it automagically quantified and uploaded and shared. Digitally, he would actually appear dead.

he is defining the immediate future as follows: old people huddling in big cities, afraid of the sky.

CHAPTER 12 Mom and Dad Boot Up

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.

In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the wizard Saruman turns from wisdom to rapacity in his taste for power. He rips out the ancient trees and flattens the land to make room for the industries of war. The lesson is simple: All technology, along with its blessings, also carries a temptation—an appetite for control, a willingness to flatten the world (if needed) to make space for the human will. And

if new orthodoxies of unbelief attack inherited faith, if scientism and a cult of technology lower our eyes to the gadgets in our hands, the effect ripples across a culture's soul.

The political impact of new technologies has been massive. They shape the nature of our reasoning and our discourse. They've moved us away from a public square tempered by logic, debate, and reflection based on the printed word, to a visual and sensory one, emotionally charged and spontaneous.

Computers rather frighten me, because I never did learn to type, so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.