Quotes About Technology

How terribly easy it had turned out to be to transform naturally occurring uranium into hollow spheres of plutonium, pack the spheres with tritium and surround them with explosives and deuterium, and do it all in such miniature that the capacity to incinerate a million people could fit on the bed of Cody Flayner's pickup.

A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn't crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who'd rejected you, than compassionate forbearance?

Un inconvenient del correu electrònic és que només el pots esborrar una vegada: no pots arrugar-lo, rebotre'l contra el terra, trepitjar-lo, fer-ne mil bocins i cremar-lo. Hi podia haver alguna cosa més cruel, per part d'algú que t'acabava de rebutjar, que una paciència compassiva?

The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard.

In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.

Technological capitalism is an infernal machine. It always has its way with us. If it doesn't dismantle the Postal Service from without, it will steal its soul from within. The attachment of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia. It's the double vision of a people whose hearts don't like what their desires have created.

Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email.

He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self.

Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe.

el amor verdadero altera el mundo del tecnoconsumismo, y a éste no le queda más remedio que alterar, a su vez, el amor.

If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I'd begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it.

He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. ("Sixty's too bright," he said, "and forty is too dim.

How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.

When human beings try to become more than human, they quickly become less than human.

Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

Someone needed to invent a way to be close to people without having to see them, or talk to them on the phone, or write (or read) letters, or e-mails, or texts.

When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. I'm not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of "animal welfare" and "humaneness," then decide if you still believe in eating meat.

What about guns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were angry, and if you were, they wouldn't fire, even if you were a police officer? What about skyscrapers made with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through?

S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of broilers increased by 65%, while their time-to-market dropped 60% and their feed requirements dropped 57%. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be 300 pounds in 10 years, while eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.

In 1930, more than 20% of the American population was employed in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%.