Quotes About Technology

We thus live in an increasingly lonely world of unravelling communities and families.

But the single most remarkable and defining moment of the past 500 years came at 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945. At that precise second, American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. From that point onward, humankind had the capability not only to change the course of history, but to end it.

A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality. Each of us is ensnared within numerous all-encompassing spider webs, which on the one hand restrict our movements, but at the same time transmit our tiniest jiggle to faraway destinations.

The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood.

If I don't update my body's anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that the millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.

Throughout this book, I often use the first person to speak about the future of humankind. I talk about what 'we' need to do about 'our' problems. But maybe there are no 'we'. Maybe one of 'our' biggest problems is that different human groups have completely different futures. Maybe in some parts of the world you should teach your children to write computer codes, while in others you had better teach them to draw fast and shoot straight.

it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms, and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens.

threat of job losses does not result merely from the rise of infotech. It results from the confluence of infotech with biotech.

La fusión de la infotecnología y la biotecnología puede hacer que muy pronto miles de millones de humanos queden fuera del mercado de trabajo y socavar tanto la libertad como la igualdad. Los algoritmos de macrodatos pueden crear dictaduras digitales en las que todo el poder esté concentrado en las manos de una élite minúscula al tiempo que la mayor parte de la gente padezca no ya explotación, sino algo muchísimo peor: irrelevancia.

Yuval Noah Harari

Your boss wants you to constantly check your emails rather than smell flowers or dream about fairies.

Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and ultimately into sovereigns

Y quizá, lo que es más importante, la inteligencia artificial y la biotecnología están ofreciendo a la humanidad el poder de remodelar y rediseñar la vida. Muy pronto alguien tendrá que decidir cómo utilizar este poder, sobre la base de algún relato implícito o explícito acerca del significado de la vida.

The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence, but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.

by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was worse than ludicrous – it was hubris.

After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs.

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.

la fusión de la infotecnología y la biotecnología abre la puerta a un sinfín de situaciones hipotéticas sobre el tema del fin del mundo, que van de las dictaduras digitales a la creación de una clase inútil global.

And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don't need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.

Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done. Government regulation can successfully block new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative.

so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?

Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology.

Whereas humanism commanded: 'Listen to your feelings!' Dataism now commands: 'Listen to the algorithms! They know how you feel.

It and the other online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals – a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step towards uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.