Quotes About Technology

Even natural wonders aren't what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can't turn off. It often feels like we're struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid-nervous breakdown.

The past is reduced to a slide show. The future is a YouTube video that won't load.

Through the devices in our pockets, we are reminded of our limitless freedom, limitless opportunities, limitless ways to indulge our interests. And yet, our lives feel more difficult to navigate than ever.

Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members.

It's just a robot. It doesn't have feelings … yet.

At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.

A lot of the work in United States is highly critical of technology. I'm using 15 000 watts of power and 18 different pieces of electronic equipment to say that.

This is what Grandma was worried about, you know.' 'Me eating a whole chocolate cake practically all by myself in a single sitting?' 'You falling in love with a computer geek. Sure, they have good stock options and smokin' hot bods, but what about that dark side of genius that reanimates the dead?

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.

It seems there is nothing I cannot find out from my oracle, the computer.

How such incredibly powerful creatures could be so vulnerable was a crime against the universe. The tragic futility of it all was what really got me. The rhino's brilliant million-year evolutionary effort to build up three tons of muscle, bone and horn to defend itself meant nothing in a modern technological world that didn't care a fig about them. The fact that our grandchildren may never see a rhino in the wild again was a pivotal reason to continue to try and save them.

Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can't believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did with their spare time before computers came along to suck it all up.

I dialed it now, and the machine picked up. I listened to a dead man's voice. I hung up, wondering how long it would be before someone unplugged the machine, how long before the telephone company cut off the phone service. You don't die all at once. Not anymore. These days you die a little at a time.

Now I know what development means: air-conditioning. With air-conditioning, we can have civilization, which exists only in temperate climates.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.

En su libro Estrategia moderna (Modern Strategy) apuntó diecisiete factores a tener en cuenta: la gente, la sociedad, la cultura, la política, la ética, la economía y la logística, la organización, la administración, la información y la inteligencia, la teoría estratégica y la doctrina, la tecnología, la operatividad, el mando, la geografía, la fricción / el azar / la incertidumbre, el adversario y el tiempo.

Como demostraba la experiencia del Modelo T de Ford, incluso el más diestro fabricante de un producto con costes reducidos al mínimo podía verse superado y atrapado por un producto mejor.

To a great extent, the superior transportation and agricultural technology of Europe and its efficient economic and logistic methods made possible its triumph over the primitive world, not its customary military techniques and advanced weapons. The

Video screens can offer many useful things: entertainment, information, even distraction from stress. But they can't make goofy faces, give hugs, or provide a deep sense of safety and security.

For the first time that evening, a small idea was uttered by the representative of this extraordinary company. Schmidt spoke of invigorating the Google PAC, and pushing harder to get their side of the issue better heard. And I thought, Wow. This is a Google solution to this, the most important problem facing this republic? This the most they can imagine?

Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

In speaking of a constitution in cyberspace we are simply asking: What values should be protected there? What values should be built into the space to encourage what forms of life?

We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology. (p. 47)