Quotes About Technology

It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it.

In our first issue of 1983 we reported on a new piece of equipment only available in Japan, the $1,000 compact disc player, with the headline "Will the Compact Disc Make the LP Obsolete?

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.

Britain never regained its naval and economic dominance over the world, and it remains notoriously conflicted ("Brexit") about its role in Europe. But Britain is still among the world's six richest nations, is still a parliamentary democracy under a figurehead monarch, is still a world leader in science and technology, and still maintains as its currency the pound sterling rather than the euro

In areas where there were only hunter-gatherers to begin with, those groups of hunter-gatherers who adopted food production outbred those who didn't.

why, within Eurasia, were European societies, rather than those of the Fertile Crescent or China or India, the ones that colonized America and Australia, took the lead in technology, and became politically and economically dominant in the modern world?

With no other accessible islands to colonize, the Moriori had to remain in the Chathams, and to learn how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation by castrating some male infants. The result was a small, unwarlike population with simple technology and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization.

Information could be spread far more widely, more accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth.

Immediate reasons for Pizarro's success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing.

The reasons that Europeans colonized New Guinea, rather than vice versa, are obvious. Europeans were the ones who had the oceangoing ships and compasses to travel to New Guinea; the writing systems and printing presses to produce maps, descriptive accounts, and administrative paperwork useful in establishing control over New Guinea; the political institutions to organize the ships, soldiers, and administration; and the guns to shoot New Guineans who resisted with bow and arrow and clubs.

The first cameras, typewriters, and television sets were as awful as Otto's seven-foot-tall gas engine. That makes it difficult for an inventor to foresee whether his or her awful prototype might eventually find a use and thus warrant more time and expense to develop it.

Immediate reasons for Pizarro's success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing. The title of this book will serve as shorthand for those proximate factors, which also enabled modern Europeans to conquer peoples of other continents.

Maritime technology coupled with political organization was similarly essential for European expansions to other continents, as well as for expansions of many other peoples.

Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.

human population densities were gradually rising throughout the late Pleistocene anyway, thanks to improvements in human technology for collecting and processing wild foods. As population densities rose, food production became increasingly favored because it provided the increased food outputs needed to feed all those people.

Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

BECAUSE TECHNOLOGY BEGETS more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention.

Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500.

Of course, those technological and political differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world's inequalities. Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood. How, though, did the world get to be the way it was in A.D. 1500?

Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.

Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.

Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.

1) The availability of cheap slave labor in classical times supposedly discouraged innovation then, whereas high wages or labor scarcity now stimulate the search for technological solutions.

1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle;