Quotes About Technology

Smartphones are miracles, and they've turned us into gods. But in one simple respect, they're primitive: you can't slam down the receiver.

The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems.

The massively parallel online experience will go on, faithful to the tyranny of the place it pretends to escape.

A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone—choose your schizophrenia.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

High above Adam's prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet's surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands - look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There's no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.

The game's best AIs are smarter than last year's interplanetary probes. Play becomes the engine of human growth. But

In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things.

The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

A simple, five-command loop expands into a beautiful segmented structure of fifty lines. Little portions of program detach into reusable parts. Neelay's father hooks up a cassette tape player, for easy reloading of their hours of work in mere minutes. But the volume button must be set just right, or everything explodes with a read error.

Neelay, please

It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment

Science grew out of the craft tradition

We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments—can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom. Spencer R. Weart

The technology that made possible long-distance pipeline construction was electric arc welding.

when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

A Canadian physician and entrepreneur named Abraham Gesner pioneered the development of coal oil, initially as a source of coal gas for lighting.

If destructive technology amplifies violence, constructive technology amplifies compassion, and the lessons of technology are universal.

In a matter of months, the Canadian physician developed a distinctive process for making illuminating gas from bitumen with coal oil as an intermediary. When he applied for a Nova Scotia patent on his process in June 1849, he used the patent to protect his products' brand names as well, calling them kerosene and kerosene gas (from keros, Greek for "wax," and -ene to associate the new products with familiar camphene).

The railroad, when it came, would meet high expectations. It came quickly enough, but before the necessary technologies converged into a successful system, variety flourished. Passengers were first carried on 25 March 1807 on the Oystermouth Tramroad on the Gower Peninsula in Swansea, northwest of Cardiff in Wales. The cars were horse-drawn, and the operator paid tolls to the company that owned the road.

Coal-oil production in early 1860 totaled some 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per day, or about 7 million to 9 million gallons per year.22 By comparison, the whale-oil harvest had peaked in 1854 at about 10.3 million gallons and begun a sharp decline.

Man-made death became epidemic in the twentieth century because increasingly efficient killing technologies made the extreme exercise of national sovereignty pathological.

Distilling these mixtures in turn came to be called "cracking" them—breaking them open, as it were.