Quotes About Technology

The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.

I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

Technology is such a broad kind of term, it really applies to so many things, from the electric light to running cars on oil. All of these different things can be called technology. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with it, as I expect most people do. With the computer, I spend so many hours sitting in front of a computer.

You know, I thought we could use a good myth about technology to help guide us through these particular modern waters right now.

Normally, I love to go to the movies and when I see a character portrayed by different actors at different ages, it kind of pops a little bit for me. It brings me out of the movie experience. Now we have the technology to cure that.

I shop at a computer store called, "Your Crap Is Already Obsolete."

Computers thwart, contort, and befuddle us. We mess around with fonts, change screen backgrounds, slow down or increase mouse speed. We tweak and we piddle. We spend countless hours preparing PowerPoint slides that most people forget in seconds. We generate reports in duplicate and triplicate and then somw that end up serving only one function for most of the recipients - to collect dust.

It's not that you can't get things done with the use of a cell phone; indeed you can get a lot of things done. However, the nature of what you get done is highly skewed. Just as the man with only a hammer sees everything as nails, the incessant cell phone user accomplishes a variety of tasks, understandably enough, that accrue directly to having a cell phone.

By some estimates, the data-storage curve is rocketing upward at the rate of 800 percent per year. Organizations are collecting so much data they're overwhelmed. Families are no different; we have more things on disk, more photos, more items stored than we'll ever have to allocate time for. "Since Kodachrome made way for jpeg, pictures accumulate on hard drives like wet leaves in a gutter." (Jim Lewis, author of "The King is Dead")

The results are in and the cell phone has become the most isruptive aspect of work and everyday life. With more than four fifths of the population sporting these little gadgets, it's now taken as a given that any part of your day is subject to disruption.

Each of us was born in an era when complexity has become the hallmark of our existence.

No previous generation on earth has had more competing demands for its time and attention than this one.

In his entire life, George Washington never spent a second watching CNN Headline News or making a Facebook post, and he had no Twitter followers!

The infrastructure that holds society in place is based on increasingly sophisticated systems, technology, and complexity.

That's the great thing about a tractor. You can't really hear the phone ring.

One thing you can say about nuclear power: the people who believe it is the silver bullet for America's energy problems never give up.

In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned.

Burroughs predicted that automobiles and their drivers would eventually "seek out even the most secluded nook or corner of the forest and befoul it with noise and smoke." To him, the popularity of the Model T was the beginning of the end. He described Ford's brainchild vehicle as "a demon on wheels.

On the night of March 17, 1887, most of Fort Myers's other 349 residents lined up outside the Edison estate and gasped with wonder as its lights went on. The local newspaper speculated that a date would soon be announced for the rest of the community to be properly wired and illuminated. But the anticipated shipments didn't arrive, and Edison returned to New Jersey.

Even fifteen years earlier, it would have been impossible, since there were very few cars (eight thousand as opposed to fourteen million horses) and fewer drivable roads. With the exception of train travel, the average American rarely ventured more than twelve miles from home, because that was the distance a horse and wagon could comfortably cover from there and back in a day.

Movies, Burroughs continued, would be the ruin of the American intellect: "The average person goes to the moving-picture theater and looks at senseless films for a couple of hours, and goes away without having really had to use his brain once. . . . In the old days, he might have been spending that time with a book before him, which would have given him more information and would have made him exercise his brain a little to get it.

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

There is very little that is natural left in people when they stray from the cities. Day hiking in Gore-Tex with a bag of trail mix and a cell phone in a fanny pack and a bottle of iced chai tea clipped to your belt isn't actually natural, it's tourism, or worse, voyeurism.