Quotes About Technology

Ancient recipients of instant news probably couldn't do very much about it, for instance. Xerxes would still need three months to get his army together, and he might not get home for years.

I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature.

Alors que ce mauvais siècle approche de sa fin, le pressentiment se répand que l'idée de faire histoire n'était qu'un prétexte. Le sujet décisif de la modernité, c'est de faire nature.

Of a techno-human culture that wants to be more than a successful barbarism, two things above all are required: psychological cultural formation and the cultural capacity for translation. Mathematicians must become poets, cyberneticists must become philosophers of religion, doctors must become composers, computer scientists must become shamans. Was humanity ever something other than the art of managing transitions?

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

Chance – invisible, furtive, and silent – is the vast canvas upon which all the rest of war is painted. Skill, courage, ruse, character, the elements of nature, technology and all the other components of war all operate against the backdrop of chance. Again and again, chance has raised up and brought down empires, snatched laurels from one hand to throw to another, and destroyed the most finely wrought plans.

Such perfection endures. For more than two millennia after horse-riding was invented, the warhorse remained the most important military technology bar none. A plentiful supply of horses was critical even in the 19th century, well after firearms had replaced the bows and arrows. Have you ever wondered why Napoleon, who won all of his battles until 1812, lost one battle after another in 1813 and 1814, leading to defeat and abdication? The surprising answer is: horses.

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?

Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes.

Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform.

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one's mind even at today's rudimentary levels of connectivity. The "transactive memory system" called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn't come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.

The reason that stuff goes bad is because it's crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain." "So they'll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year's supply of bubble bath for cats.

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

Electrophoresis.

Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind.

Half my age, and she's probably already forgotten the difference between the meat she was born with and the chrome that came after.

They're not post-Human. Not yet." "How can you tell?" It was only half a joke. "Because otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk to them at all.

Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

You give up a lot when you don't trust the EM spectrum.

Turns out that when something gets cheaper, or more efficient, we just end up using so much more of the stuff that the savings disappear under a wave of increased consumption. They call it the "Jevons Paradox"