Quotes About Technology

Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our 'demonstration' of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.

Engineers today design efficient machines scaled to meet most human needs, from microchips to passenger jets. In earlier eras, animals were bred to such purposes: sheep for mutton and sheep for wool; cattle for meat, cattle for milk, and oxen for hauling; dogs to a thousand purposes

The Air Force had discovered the jet stream.

Horses increased in number after the commercialization of the steam engine because horsepower filled the niche below steam power. A horse stood ready to pull a cart or plow a field on command, without the delay of building up a head of steam. Energy transitions are seldom so complete that they drive out every competitor. Much of the world still relies on animals for farm work and transportation: horses, oxen, camels, llamas, water buffalo, elephants, even fellow humans.

By 1879, national hay production totaled 35 million tons, a figure that had nearly tripled to 97 million tons by 1909. More than half the land in New England was devoted to hay by 1909 as well, and at least twenty-two states harvested more than a million acres a year of hay and forage.11 The mechanization of American agriculture with horse-drawn or horse-powered machinery supported this vast expansion.

In the early 1740s, Coalbrookdale replaced its own horse-driven pumps with a Newcomen engine, the first time a steam engine was used to make iron, and a major reduction in expense.54 From this point forward, mining advanced rapidly, as an increasing number of steam engines restored old mines previously drowned and kept new mines dry.55

The real change away from horse-drawn transportation came with the advent in the late 1880s of the electric streetcar. Frank Julian Sprague, a West Point–trained electrical engineer, installed the first commercial electric streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887.

By the turn of the century, the electric streetcar had largely replaced the use of horses in public transportation. The animals continued to serve for general hauling, merchandise delivery, and small-scale energy generation. In fact, their urban numbers actually increased.32 Only the development of the internal combustion engine and its application to power the truck and the automobile across the years 1900 to 1915 replaced the city horse with mechanical transportation.

The impersonality of the written word made it the easiest means of exchange...

Given our present evolution of consciousness, and especially the historical and technological access we now have to the "whole picture," I now wonder if a sincere person can even have a healthy and holy "personal" relationship with God if that God does not also connect them to the universal. A personal God cannot mean a smaller God, nor can God make you in any way smaller—or such would not be God.

She never answers during the day, Max explained. She lets her machine pick up. People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with, Miles told him. In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.

Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.

Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare

Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end.

Developments in high technology reflect an ancient model for craftsmanship, but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. These ills are complicated because few institutions set out to produce unhappy workers. People seek refuge in inwardness when material engagement proves empty; mental anticipation is privileged above concrete encounter; standards of quality in work separate design from execution.

The technicians worked around him now as though they expected to launch him into space.

One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that when communication has reached its zenith, when the human voice can encircle the globe in a matter of seconds, when man can project the image of his face thousands of miles, it is almost impossible to know with any degree of accuracy the truth of a political situation only a hundred miles distant! Propaganda jams the media of communication.

Experts tell us that the global economy will worsen while household appliances will get smarter. By the time your child is twenty-one years old and ready to enter the workforce, all of her job interviews will be conducted by Roombas.

I have found on occasion that the Italians are suspicious of the benefits of air-conditioning. Or skeptical, or resistant, or oblivious to the benefits of air-conditioning.

I want some time without you organic life forms.

It warmed my heart that my children had the right priorities: their skills, their images, their views on YouTube.

Most helmsmen would've been satisfied with a pilot's wheel or a tiller. Leo had also installed a keyboard, monitor, aviation controls from a Learjet, a dubstep soundboard, and motion-control sensors from a Nintendo Wii. He could turn the ship by pulling on the throttle, fire weapons by sampling an album, or raise sails by shaking his Wii controllers really fast. Even by demigod standards, Leo was seriously ADHD.

Zeus did not answer. He was probably too busy recording my humiliation to share on Snapchat.

Once he'd even reprogrammed the electronic billboards in Time Square to read: ALL DA LADIES LUV LEO... accidentally, of course.