Quotes About Technology

Along Maine's Kennebec River alone, thirty-six companies operated fifty-three icehouses with a total capacity of a million tons. But over the next few decades, cheap electricity devastated the business, first by making the artificial production of ice more economical and then by spurring homeowners to replace their iceboxes with electric refrigerators. As Gavin Weightman writes in The Frozen-Water Trade, the "huge industry simply melted away.

as a utility served more customers, it would become more efficient, allowing it to cut the cost of power further and in turn attract even more customers.

information is a commodity that can be processed by a machine.

the path of technological progress and its human consequences are determined not simply by advances in science and engineering but also, and more decisively, by the influence of technology on the costs of producing and consuming goods and services. A competitive marketplace guarantees that more efficient modes of production and consumption will win out over less efficient ones.

our longstanding idea of a computer is obsolete.

In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than "the sex organs of the machine world,

As we've entered the computer age, however, our talent for connecting with other minds has had an unintended consequence.

Intensive multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy," commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research.

The strip-mining of "relevant content" replaces the slow excavation of meaning. IT

we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I Zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski

What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden.

In 1930, it hit 80 percent. Soon, it was over 90 percent. Only a handful of manufacturers, mainly those running big factories in remote locations, continued to produce their own current. Thanks to Samuel Insull, the age of the private power plant was over. The utility had triumphed.

Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we're online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.

The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage.

That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper's article, that people would come to read "with the eyes shut." They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an "indispensable," which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines.

those with the helpful software were found "to aimlessly click around" as they tried to crack the puzzle.27

More than that, though, the way the punch-card tabulator came to be sold and used would set the pattern for the entire modern history of business computing.

In programming the World Wide Computer, we will be programming our lives.

All technological change is generational change.

In Google's world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive—and better algorithms to steer the course of its thought.

concordances. But here, too, the effects are different. As

the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in.