Quotes About Technology

Google, says its CEO, is more than a mere business; it is a "moral force.

We are soon to have everywhere," wrote one futurist, "smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonators, sterilizers of water, air, food, and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads, and subways.

Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing.

The automation of wayfinding serves to "inhibit the process of experiencing the physical world by navigation through it." 4 As

The Web had turned out to be less the new home of Mind than the new home of Business. The

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form.

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.19

Bruce Friedman,

Mothers, wrote Bellamy, would no longer have "to make themselves hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of mischief." The kids would all have their own indispensables.

When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding us or controlling us. We're behind the wheel, but we can't be sure who's driving.

The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.

These include all the tools we use to extend or support our mental powers—to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory.

Automation tends to turn us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit our ability to learn and to develop expertise.

We'll know that Google has truly fulfilled its vision when the Googleplex no longer needs toilets at all.

The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods.

THE TROUBLE with automation is that it often gives us what we don't need at the cost of what we do.

gained. We shouldn't allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we've numbed an essential part of our self.

Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them.

it has become almost impossible for us to imagine what life was like before electricity began to flow through the sockets in our walls.

McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense "sensuous involvement" with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a "considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.

When automation distances us from our work, when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.

Rather than allowing technology to control us, Mumford implied, we can control technology—if only we can muster the courage to exert the full power of our free will over the machines we make.

Technology is amoral, and inventions are routinely deployed in ways their creators neither intend nor sanction.

To hold inventors liable for the misuse of their inventions is to indict progress itself. That's