Quotes About Technology

When industries fixate on automating jobs away, they paradoxically spoke demand for ghost work, shredding the social contract between employer and worker in their wake.

1883, Printemps achieved the distinction of being the first department store in Paris to be lit electrically. Zola,

Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.

There are few endeavors in which it is more important to keep options open than in software development. In Chapter 3, "Decide as Late as Possible

A Standish Group study found that 45 percent of features in a typical system are never used and 19 percent are rarely used.

Software rarely comes with a warranty.

Software rarely comes with a warranty. Let's

Andrew is the operating system of the future and always will be.

WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.

We have become so inundated with information that the average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words as is found in many a novel. Unfortunately, this form of reading is rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated; rather, the average 34 gigabytes consumed by most of us represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert's famous description of the child's "grasshopper mind"6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically "hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

Increasing numbers of developmental researchers observe that when parents read stories on e-books with their children, their interactions frequently center on the more mechanical and more gamelike aspects of e-books, rather than the content and the words and ideas in the stories. Most parents are simply better at fostering language and helping to clarify concepts when they read physical books to their preschool children.

There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests. Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed. And we are—

Less happily, however, we are beginning to observe the direct and indirect influence of the digital word-spotting, text-grazing reading patterns of contemporary readers—how things are read—on how texts are being written. When publishers are forced to consider the needs

I worry that we are even closer to the stripping away of complex thoughts when they do not fit the memory-enfeebling restriction on the number of characters used to convey them.

In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.

Num meio que nos defronta continuamente com um excesso de informações, a grande tentação de muitos é se retirar para depósitos conhecidos de informações facilmente digeríveis, menos densas, intelectualmente menos exigentes. A ilusão de estarmos informados por um dilúvio diário de informações dimensionadas eletronicamente para o olho pode dificultar uma análise crítica de nossas realidades complexas.

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

The medium is the messenger to the cortex, and it begins to shape it from the very start.

Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters.

But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote?

What if we have become virtually addicted to the heightened sensory stimulation that composes much of our daily lives and cannot stop ourselves from pursuing it incessantly, as Judith Shulevitz suggests in6 The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time and as technology experts in "persuasion design" principles know very well?

In a future time when most human thought has been accelerated by artificial intelligence and external memory can be shared on a universal matrix... GITS 2

The most serious cause of illness that we may face as we proceed to the twenty-first century is increasing human isolation.