Quotes About Technology

Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.

From the time we began to build houses and cities, since we invented the wheel, we have not advanced one step toward happiness. We have always been in halves. As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.

But I do not use the Internet, because I know myself too well. Once I got on the Internet I would get so distracted, I'd be basically giving one of my books to the Internet because I wouldn't be writing. I'd be playing on that machine. Interview by Associated Press Nov 03, 2010

What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves. If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.

He turned away and I turned to him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone.

Even our best endeavors turn against us. A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man because the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?

At present, computers are spectacular at number crunching and data processing. We can code programmes that feel as though computers are interacting with us, and that's fun, but in fact they aren't interacting in a way that we expect a human being to interact. But what will happen when a programme that has self-developed, that has its own version of what we call consciousness - realises, in the human sense of the verb 'to realise', exactly what/who is on the other side of the screen?

There's a new kind of quasi-religious discourse forming, with its own followers, its creed, its orthodoxy, its heretics, its priests, its literature, its eschatological framework. Even its own Singularity. It's AI.

All our faults, vanities, idiocies, prejudices, cruelty. Do you really want augmented humans, superhumans, uploaded humans, forever humans, with all the shit that comes with us? Morally and spiritually, we are barely crawling out of the sea onto dry land. We're not ready for the future you want. Have we ever been ready? said Victor. Progress is a series of accidents, of mistakes made in a hurry, of unforeseen consequences.

The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.

The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses.

With the Internet, characters like Drudge could pursue—without the constraints and rules imposed by editors and institutions—

We are not evolved really very well to be able to understand or to be able to work with and grapple with technologies that we have.

I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging.

Our mission is to organize the world's information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it's going to work.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.

Photography today is so accurate and so good that it's really so much easier just to take photographs and work from them.

With the Internet, you can get lots of info in advance, but a local person who knows how to work the system is invaluable.

It is quite interesting that whilst there are tremendous theories, in the 1960s when IT was born, everybody was supposedly going to their cottage in the countryside to work in a virtual way.

There is no human feeling to the US securities markets and sometimes no discernible evidence of human intelligence either. But they work.

As we all know, the internet is not a true friend of the music industry yet, but technology is slowly changing that. Soon it will work right for all involved.

Enterprise is hard work. You have to integrate the client with the optimized systems of all the servers and software.

For those who wish to stay and work in computer science or technology, fields badly in need of their services, let's roll out the welcome mat.