Quotes About Technology

Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today because of the improvements.

Pump seals therefore had to be devised that were both gastight and greaseless, a puzzle no one had ever solved before that required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)

Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "Culture of Silence".

Oh we're a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We've been to the moon and we're still fighting over Jerusalem.

Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

We are advancing into a post-professional society.

It is interesting to note, harking back again to the exponential growth of information technology, that the hardware on which Watson ran in 2011 was said to be about the size of the average bedroom. Today, we are told, it runs on a machine that is the size of three pizza boxes, and by the early 2020s Watson will sit comfortably in a smartphone.

Half of US doctors use the app known as Epocrates, a digital drug-reference resource that computerizes the task of finding out how different drugs interact. This task was once a time-consuming, often inconclusive piece of excavation from a 2,500-page drug-reference manual, known as the Physicians Desk Reference.

The Canadian science-fiction writer William Gibson could well have been speaking of technology in the professions when he said: '[t]he future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

Technology will be the main driver of this change. And, in the long run, we will neither need nor want professionals to work in the way that they did in the twentieth century and before.

This is a new division of labour, and traditional professionals sometimes struggle here because they are no longer in the driving-seat.

Automation is what most professionals have in mind when they think of the relevance of technology for their disciplines.

This automation therefore complements but does not fundamentally change the central way in which services are delivered.

However, as Chapter 2 shows, there is a new generation of machine in action now, and these are systems (much more of which in Chapter 4) that can replace parts of, and sometimes all of, certain kinds of professional work.

Whereas automation is the use of technology to support this traditional model, innovation enables ways of making practical expertise available that simply were not possible (or even imaginable) without the systems in question.

There will be very few jobs for life, much less security, and very little predictability. There will be an emphasis instead on being able to learn, develop, and adapt rapidly as new roles and tasks arise. Different ways of communicating Not many decades ago professionals communicated in three ways—face-to-face, in writing, and by telephone. That was it.

Sending e-mails and texts is an automated version of writing letters, whereas social networking is an innovative technology, by which we mean, in this context, that it gives rise to ways of communicating that were not possible in the past.

More than this, however, professionals should become directly involved in the development of the systems that handle and deliver practical expertise.

The first is the notion that machines and systems will work alongside tomorrow's professionals as partners. The challenge here is to allocate tasks, as between human beings and machines, according to their relative strengths.

Our view is that there is nothing so special or unique about professionals' knowledge to suggest that some of it cannot be made easily accessible and understandable on an online basis.

Lighter laptops followed (our first one had a 10mb hard disk; today one of our laptops, at about one-third of the weight, has flash storage of 1 terabyte—100,000 times larger in thirty years).

More people in our world, in other words, have mobile phones than toothbrushes (which perhaps speaks as much about dental hygiene as 'pervasive computing').

Many of today's students who are training to be traditional professionals will, in due course, be engaged as knowledge engineers. These new professionals will specialize in designing certain kinds of online service—we call this the 'knowledge engineering' model (section 5.7).