Quotes About Technology

With an ever-increasing number of fast-moving neutrons flinging themselves about, splitting atoms at an exponential rate, scientists could create what was called a chain reaction—and generate enormous quantities of energy. Which prompted the obvious question: To what purpose?

Within a week of Hahn's discovery, American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer sketched a crude bomb on his blackboard.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

Did you win your sword fight?" "Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world." "And you wrote the software." "Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

Our marvelous electronic devices can seduce us into believing we are hard at work, but we are merely sending and receiving insignificant messages, while the real work goes undone, day after day, week after week, year after year. Real thinking and grappling hurt like hell. That's why so many people avoid it like a root canal.

They describe the feeling of being online as a kind of anesthesia that eases the pain of everyday life.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

If that's there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

Liftoff! We have a liftoff...

Emails we can read, say no to 'send a receipt', mark as unread, categorise, label and put in a folder whilst drinking tea and thinking about other things. It's hard work making the right noises and facial expressions in response to an in-person reminder.

"Life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body.

In the space age, man will be able to go around the world in two hours - one hour for flying and one hour to get to the airport.

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose...

Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way that Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible, and therefore irrelevant.

With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions

Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.

All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television