Quotes About Technology

There are two or three things that we haven't been able to confront or even acknowledge politically. One is that the aim of the Industrial Revolution from year one has been to replace people with technology. So it's a little contemptible to hear these people express in surprise at this late date that we have an unemployment problem.

I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn't want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his life. He didn't want his death to be the end of a technological process.

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

But good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.

The faith that limitless technological progress will finally solve the problems of limitless contamination seems to depend upon some sort of neo-religion.

That computers are expected to become as common as TV sets in "the future" does not impress me or matter to me. I do not own a TV set. I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

It is altogether conceivable that we may go right along with this business of "business," with our curious religious faith in technological progress, with our glorification of our own greed and violence always rationalized by our indignation at the greed and violence of others, until our land, our world, and ourselves are utterly destroyed.

The specialists are profiting too well from the symptoms, evidently, to be concerned about cures—just as the myth of imminent cure (by some "breakthrough" of science or technology) is so lucrative and all-justifying as to foreclose any possibility of an interest in prevention.

A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones.

The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals.

We haven't accepted—we can't really believe—that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

I do realize how this all sounds. I realize that in this account of my journey to the Little House on the Prairie, a journey that in Pa's time would have taken at least ten days, my litany of misfortunes contains words like power windows and Wi-Fi. I realize, yes, that one of the greatest hardships I had to contend with involved a car that starts with the push of a button.

While they mixed explosive chemicals, drew sparks from electrical charges and forged steam engines, Day was meddling with the human mind. Even in the so-called age of experiments, this was an experiment to top the lot

In a darkened world no longer illuminated by the light of this center [God], technical advances are scarcely more than despairing attempts to make Hell a more agreeable place to live in. This must be particularly emphasized against those who think that by spreading the civilization of science and technology even to the uttermost ends of the earth, they can furnish all the essential preconditions for a golden age. One cannot escape the Devil so easily as that.

What we need to do now," he mused, "is make better sci-fi movies so that we can have better contact experiences." That is hermeneutics.

My contention is that especially young, recently trained engineers are in a position to recognize and to react on a presumptive anomaly: They are trained within the technological frame but have low enough inclusion to question the basic assumptions of that frame.

Three situations were distinguished to characterize the developmental process of an artifact at some stage: no dominant technological frame, one technological frame, and several dominant technological frames. It is stressed that these situations should not be interpreted as forming a rigid scheme of phases through which an artifact successively has to pass. Rather, it is a heuristic device to simplify the description of the "seamless web" of history. In

Discussions about technology—its capacity, what it can and cannot do, what it should and should not do—are the reverse side of the coin to debates on the capacity, ability, and moral entitlements of humans. Attempts

When the social groups involved in designing and using technology decide that a problem is solved, they stabilize the technology. The result is closure. Closure and stabilization, however, are not isolated events; they occur repeatedly during technological development. To

Technology/science," "pure/applied," "internal/external," and "technical/ social" are some of the dichotomies that were foreign to the integrating inventors, engineers, and managers of the system- and network-building era. To

Pinch, Bijker, and Hughes note that inclusion in a group, organization, or bureaucracy dampens the originality of inventors and innovators (Bijker, this volume). High inclusion brings mission orientation or commitment to incremental improvements in the evolving technological system with which the group, organization, or bureaucracy has identified. The

a machine cannot be understood aside from its end-user and the cultural ambience in which it works. The role of the end-user is to insert that part of the iceberg of cultural knowledge that cannot be programmed. Progress

Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion John Law

Explanations of the stability of technologies must take account of the social relations of work as