Quotes About Technology

Tens of thousands who could never afford to own, feed and stable a horse, had by this bright invention enjoyed the swiftness of motion which is perhaps the most fascinating feature of material life.

I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.

I want to do something with my life; I want to be a cyborg.

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn't been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

We were promised a simpler life, and technology has only complicated our lives.

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now.

Sellers who are successful today know that customers can go online and find out all that stuff in seconds.

In Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us,* the authors state that distractions consume an average of 2.1 hours per day.

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, "a sum so small," he wrote, "that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.

Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation's new democratic traditions survive in the

Simulmatics died. The fantasy of predicting human behavior by way of machines did not. Instead, it took new forms, forms that depended on forgetting that Simulmatics had ever existed.

Replacing "progress" with "innovation" skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

A ROBOT COMPUTER WILL GIVE CBS THE FASTEST REPORTING IN HISTORY," read the headline.31 The UNIVAC would stay in Philadelphia—it was too big to move—but in New York, CBS would install a fake, a console lit, from the inside, by a string of Christmas lights. The first computer most Americans ever saw was an empty shell: a stunt.

in 1916, only 16 percent of Americans lived in homes with electricity, but by 1927, that percentage had risen to 63.118

The minutes of white-collar workers' lives were tapped out by typewriters and adding machines. They had the cheerfulness of robots, having lost the capacity to feel anything except boredom.

Algorithms of Oppression

And although it may seem that governments and citizens (in the form of NGOs or civil society organizations) are given somewhat equal access, the truth is that no citizen, not even a director of a powerful NGO, can simply pick up the phone and dial Mark Zuckerberg to complain about a policy decision the way that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has been known to do.62

in the middle of the decade, three revolutionary technological developments created the conditions for anyone to create and share videos: the smartphone, video-sharing platforms, and fast internet speeds enabled millions of people to capture, distribute, and consume video

Israel was among the first governments to secure a backdoor deal with a social media company, but it's far from the last.

Dozens of articles took aim at pundit Malcolm Gladwell after he dismissively wrote in the New Yorker: "Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.

Algorithms are simply incapable of encapsulating human experience, regardless of what Silicon Valley would have us believe. And once companies have taken humans out of the loop and relinquished the reins to machines, there is no telling the sort of cultural norms they will eventually propagate in the future.

Facebook and its counterparts don't operate like courts; there is no case law, no checks and balances, and—until recently—no due process. The judges (content moderators) are not appointed or elected by voters, unlike in well-functioning democracies. There are simply no systems of accountability to the process and, as such, the same image that might be banned for one user can be allowed for another.

Facebook and its counterparts operate more like churches than courts; they are subject to influence by states and the wealthy, and all too content with disregarding the needs of their subjects in favor of those with power.