Quotes About Technology

The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

A revolução tecnológica pode, em breve, deixar milhões de seres humanos fora do mercado de trabalho e criar uma gigantesca classe social inútil, levando a convulsões sociais e políticas que nenhuma ideologia existente sabe como gerir.

What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

Does the data about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?

The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.

The system may prefer downgraded humans not because they would possess any superhuman knacks, but because they would lack some really disturbing human qualities that hamper the system and slow it down.

Si nuestra mente es la de los cazadores-recolectores, nuestra cocina es la de los antiguos agricultores.

The writing is on the wall: equality is out – immortality is in.

though the technological challenges are unprecedented and the political disagreements intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

A seu tempo, os algoritmos podem aprender a compor músicas do início ao fim, usando as emoções humanas como se fossem teclas num piano. Com base nos nossos dados biométricos, os algoritmos até podem produzir melodias personalizadas de que só nós, no mundo inteiro, é que gostamos.

Writing a private diary – a common humanist practice in previous generations – sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: 'If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.

On 11 January 2013, Dataism got its first martyr when Aaron Swartz, a twenty-six-year-old American hacker, committed suicide in his apartment.

Both politicians and voters are barely able to comprehend the new technologies, let alone regulate their explosive potential.

39. Brains as computers – computers as brains. Artificial intelligence is now poised to surpass human intelligence. 39. © VLADGRIN/Shutterstock.com.

Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, which would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.

what life was like in the millennia separating the Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution.

Ancient hunter-gatherers mastered a very wide variety of skills in order to survive, which is why it would be immensely difficult to design a robotic hunter-gatherer.

The Human Brain Project,

Until a short time ago facial recognition was a favourite example of something that even babies accomplish easily but which escaped even the most powerful computers. Today facial-recognition programs are able to identify people far more efficiently and quickly than humans can.

The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam and electricity, so in the coming decades new techno-religions may conquer the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes.

Indeed, already today computers and algorithms are beginning to function as clients in addition to producers. In the stock exchange, for example, algorithms are becoming the most important buyers of bonds, shares and commodities. Similarly in the advertisement business, the most important customer of all is an algorithm: the Google search algorithm. When people design Web pages, they often cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any human being.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes.

we might fiddle with Homo sapiens to such an extent that we would no longer be Homo sapiens. Bionic

When the nuclear age erupted in the 1940s, many forecasts were made about the future nuclear world of the year 2000. When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination of the world, everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people would be living in space colonies on Mars and Pluto. Few of these forecasts came true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet.