Quotes About Technology

I think getting information you didn't ask is one of the basic features of dating apps.

Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever." Thomas Edison, 1889

I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty.... This is our modern danger ... it may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge.

I can't get used to the ease with which one covers the world today. It's no longer an effort--Pole--equator--oceans--continents--it's just a question of which way you point the nose of your plane. The pure joy of flight as an art has given way to the pure efficiency of flight as a science.... Science is insulating man from life -- separating his mind from his senses. The worst of it is that it soon anaesthetizes his senses so that he doesn't know what he's missing.

And don't forget last year's electrodes, stuck to my leg, the centuries of science reviving one blue foot. Years from now I'll be walking around on plastic legs with a battery-powered heart and silicon eyes, eating imported apricots and flash-frozen chicken hormones. I'll think, again: In an Ice Age cave I'd be dead.

Ecological concerns are daily news now (alas). And poets have been writing all along about stars and roses; it's not such a stretch now to bring in the Hubble telescope or dark matter or genetics.

Fundamentally, a civilization's problems are rooted in energy development.

Printer drivers are the most important things in the history of the world.

Scaling Kardashev is any civilization's primary function.

The UUe will cannibalize all other economic systems.

You cannot generate data without using energy.

I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs.

In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

Switching over to a hybrid car is one of those right things, but, unfairly or not, it still has a reputation among car enthusiasts as something you have to pedal really fast when you're on the ramp merging into traffic on the 401.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present.

Likewise the innards of my sole telephone socket are disgorged; my uncertain connection to the outside world dangles by two poorly soldered wires, and it often cuts off.

Nollie's having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: "cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.

Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. They're not about the future at all. The future is just the ultimate monster in the closet, the great unknown.

The core dynamic of the capitalist system is the accumulation process, a process in which a portion of the profits reaped through the sale of goods and services is reinvested, swelling the capital stock, incorporating new technologies in the process, and permitting larger sales and profits in the future.

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.

At its worst, digital technology undermines a teen's capacity to cultivate meaningful in-person connections and actually amplifies the negative aspects of their relationships.