Quotes About Technology

An air car was just landing in the garden by the pool and beings under it were complaining of injuries and indignities done them. Perhaps this was the trouble he could feel? Grasses were for walking on, flowers and bushes were not—this was a wrongness.

It took you long enough to answer your phone." "It's my phone, Mr. Secretary. Sometimes I don't answer it at all.

Television leaves no external scars.

A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…or at best protects her privacy only with great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I don't. I feel much safer with cash. I've never heard of anyone who had much luck arguing with a computer.

As for the tank, not only is it unAmerican and probably subversive to eat without watching stereo but also the racket from it would interfere even with a directional mike aimed at us from a distance . . .

Hell, was no military man; was computer technician who had bumbled into wrong field.

noise is always a byproduct of inefficiency. A correctly designed engine is as silent as the grave.

If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with sense of humor.

But I could if I took the time and sweat to learn the language of electronics; it's not miraculous—just complex. Teleportation is simple, once you learn the language—it's the language that is difficult.

People are so used to the computer net today that it is easy to forget what a window to the world it can be—and I include myself. One can grow so canalized in using a terminal only in certain ways—paying bills, making telephonic calls, listening to news bulletins—that one can neglect its richer uses. If a subscriber is willing to pay for the service, almost anything can be done at a terminal that can be done out of bed.

So what is their crime? Twofold: a) The Shipstone companies are guilty of supplying energy to the human race at prices below those of their competitors; b) They meanly and undemocratically decline to share their industrial secret of the final assembly stage of a Shipstone.

I'm electron pusher by trade;

we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

his slot was given by his lifemate Perry Jarnell, who took six minutes. At that point his audio and video both cut out. After that, even the most pompous speakers quickly figured out that if they hadn't gotten it said within five minutes, Merril wasn't going to let them keep trying.

They made solemn pronouncements about conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, on the basis of computer models, which they had produced with computers not even bright enough to talk, let alone understand speech. They were unlike all the generations before theirs in several ways, but chiefly in that they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. Previous ages had usually had a pretty good handle on that.

I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.

I have taken lots of orders, some of which I shouldn't have, but I had never yet taken orders from a piece of machinery. "Go climb a rope!" I said. "You'll have to drag me." This is not what to say to a robot. It did.

Sharpie, I thought you liked Star Trek?" "I do. But I've seen five years of it and we've got our own Star Trek now.

Your computers must be three-phase A.C.

Baggage included a tossed salad of books as well as hundreds of the more usual film spools. The entire family, save the twins, tended to be old-fashioned about books; they liked books with covers, volumes one could hold in the lap. Film spools were not quite the same.

The hardware is more "real" than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time — if it's not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study, etc. On the other hand, the software is more "real" in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust ("kill" the computer) and the software still exists, and can "materialize" or "manifest" again in a different computer.

We need to realize that the same technology, wisely used by intelligent men and women, can free us from every form of neurotic and irrational rigidity, to dial and focus our nervous systems as easily as we dial or focus our TV, turning any channel or circuit off and on as we choose. This is what metaprogramming (cybernetic) consciousness means.

When the San Francisco Chronicle first computerized they had similar problems. I remember one story in which the Chief of Police, denouncing drugs, rambled off into a sentence about the thrill of meeting Mickey Mouse and Goofy. I assume that line came from another story but it made the Chief sound as if he had gotten into some weird chemicals himself.)

We are beginning to have that technology. For instance, biofeedback makes it possible to get into yoga meditation and tranquillity very easily compared to what yoga used to be. It used to be years to make any progress at all. With biofeedback you can make a lot of progress in two or three weeks.