Quotes About Technology

No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.

a lifestyle for creatures capable of poetry, philosophy, music, dance, mythology, art, and invention on a wide technological front.

With the e-reader, the whole book was on the same virtual page. One could not feel the depth of the pages on the left side increase as those of the right side diminished, the gradual progression from beginning to middle to end, the sense of where one stood in the journey of the story.

And with each new comfort, with each new modern convenience, man slowly dies. He removes himself from his humanity.

In fact, after a while it was the machines I was looking at, not my father at all. They had become him. They were telling me his story. Which

As they grow, wind and solar and EVs will need "big shovels" to meet their increasing call on mined minerals and land itself. It is estimated that an onshore wind turbine requires fifteen hundred tons of iron, twenty-five hundred tons of concrete, and forty-five tons of plastic. About half a million pounds of raw materials have to be mined and processed to make a battery for an electric car.

Work need not be concentrated in offices, companies can be run from homes, newspapers can be put out with almost no one in the newsroom; time spent commuting can be reduced; business meetings can be replaced by digital connecting. These impacts will last after lockdowns are well in the past. It took three years after 9/11 and more than seven years after the 2008 financial crisis for air travel in the United States to recover to the previous levels.

The "triad"—the convergence of electric vehicles, ride hailing, and self-driving cars—is far from sure. It will take electrics a long time to catch up with gasoline-powered cars as a share of the fleet. People may continue to want to own cars and drive themselves. Autonomous vehicles at scale are far from proved.

Mary Barra of GM said. "But they're going to have multiple ways that they can do that." Her ultimate goal, she said, is "a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.

the result could well be the rise of a new breed of firm—Big Mobility companies that embody what would be the transformative world of Auto-Tech.

Energy transitions are not new. They have been going on for a long time and unfold over time. Previous energy transitions have primarily been driven by technology, economics, environmental considerations, and convenience and ease. The current one has politics, policy, and activism more mixed in.

General Motors sells more cars in China than in the United States. Before the Trump trade war, up to 60 percent of U.S. soybean exports went to China, and Apple sold $40 billion a year of iPhones. China was also expected to become the biggest market for U.S. LNG.

The "triad"—the convergence of electric vehicles, ride hailing, and self-driving cars—is far from sure.

in a manner reminiscent of the British and German battleships before World War I, fifth-generation cellular—5G—along with Huawei has become in this era the embodiment of the new rivalry.

The coronavirus crisis demonstrated the degree to which digitalization has become a competitor with transportation, using electrons to connect people rather than molecules to move them.

DARPA had been established in 1958, in response to the Soviets beating the United States into space with Sputnik, the first satellite. Its mission was to ensure that the United States would from then on be "the initiator and not the victim of strategic technological surprises.

DARPA—the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers riding in tanks and trucks were being maimed and killed by IEDs. In response, the Defense Department was determined to develop vehicles that would not need drivers—what would become known as autonomous vehicles.

the first Grand Challenge, held in 2004, was a flop. The best that any vehicle could manage was just 7.5 miles on the 142-mile course in the rugged desert on the California-Nevada border. Yet this failure was also a success. "The first competition created a community of innovators, engineers, students, programmers, off-road racers, backyard mechanics, inventors, and dreamers," said a DARPA official. "The fresh thinking they brought was the spark.

Shale gas was proving to be cheaper than conventional natural gas. In 2000 shale was just 1 percent of natural gas supply. By 2011 it was 25 percent, and within two decades it could reach 50 percent.

In 1900, electrics far outnumbered gasoline cars on the streets in New York City. No one was a more powerful advocate of the electric car than the great inventor Thomas Edison, who poured a lot of his own money, along with his reputation and effort, into trying to perfect an electric vehicle.

two things killed that first generation of electric cars. One was Henry Ford's Model T and the mass production of the assembly line. The other, though less well known, was the electric starter, invented by Charles Kettering in 1911 for Cadillac after a person died from cranking a car. Kettering's invention eliminated the need for someone to stand in front and crank. Over the next several years, electric cars faded away.

The lithium-ion battery was first invented in an Exxon laboratory in the mid-1970s, during a time when it was thought that the world would run out of oil and Exxon would need to find another way to stay in the mobility business.

the Bolt rolled into showrooms in December 2016, beating Tesla by seven months with a moderately priced model that could go two hundred miles on a single charge.

While millions of miles have now been driven by test driverless cars, humans drive more than eight billion miles every day in the United States.