Quotes About Technology

Stephen Hawking won't come to Israel? I'm not one to punch a quadriplegic with glasses, but I'm sure he won't mind if we ask for his voice back—you know, the one that was created by Israeli engineers.

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 little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls?

He put this engine [a silver pocket watch] into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.

The secret of DNA's success is that it carries information like that of a computer program, but far more advanced. Since experience shows that intelligence is the only presently acting cause of information, we can infer that intelligence is the best explanation for the information in DNA.

But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance)—competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.

Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.

He's taken courses on things like animal tracking, making a fire with a bow drill, building survival shelters in the forest. Now, my being an Indian, you might imagine I would know about all that stuff. But most Indian kids, even those on the rez, are not learning those things anymore. They're too busy doing all the things other kids do—watching DVDs, playing Xbox games, and downloading rap music on their iPods.

It was easier for me to run now because all us code talkers had the new lighter portable radio units. But it was not just because the new unit on my back was lighter that I ran so much faster. I no longer had forty pounds of TBX radio to hide behind and I needed to get to cover as fast as I could.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is.

The mechanically induced mystical experience is what you have there.

I've never seen one cook before," he admitted. "It's not very interesting to look at," Janine said, stooping to peer through the glass-fronted door with him. "But it's fun to use." (Talking about a microwave oven)

With innovation and technology, seems we have forgotten to cherish the true beauty the world has to offer.

I thought you said everything would be fine." "I also thought storing my most dangerous technology on a dimensionally unstable island full of mutant dinosaurs would be safe. Much as it pains me to admit it, I do make my share of mistakes." I

Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait.

The first lift shaft was built four years before the first lift. In 1852 Peter Cooper was constructing the Cooper Union building in New York with an elevator shaft, in the sure and certain knowledge that if he built it, the lift would come. That isn't an act of impatience, it's an act of faith, and it is, archetypally, the act of an American.

One of the great lessons of 200 years of American boom is that technology is never neutral. Things come with demands, they have needs and they exploit the environments they find themselves in. America invented technopomorphism, the imbuing of functional tools with sapient attributes. There is no such thing as an inanimate object, they are just resting.

Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the chirp of the tree frog, ceaselessly bleating our identities while the frog-eating bats hover above us.

it is not really in most vendors' interest for the standards definition process to ever stop.

At which time the repulsor puts out its final effort and slows you down so you crash quite slowly into the surface." "Crash." "Quite slowly." Face & Luke

The trading characteristics of a security become more important than its underlying economics. The virtual economics began to drive the physical economy rather than the other way around.