Quotes About Technology

In 6,000 years of storytelling, [people have] gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls.

My e-mail address is actually my wife's e-mail address. I actually hate computers.

Until they found out how to activate the tractor beam." "They can think?

The Philippines has no indigenous, value-added manufacturing capacity. At the end of the Second World War only Japan and Malaysia had higher incomes per capita in Asia. Then Korea and Taiwan overtook the Philippines in the 1950s. The country slid down past Thailand in the 1980s, and Indonesia more recently. From having been in a position near the top of the Asian pile, the Philippines today is an authentic, technology-less Third World state with poverty rates to match.

We have the new greatest generation. We don't need as large a military due to the technology we have, the equipment we have outfitting our personnel. They really are storm troopers.

The Possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear stage is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on the score. -Peter Goss.

He rises a copy of a poster. On the left is a quote from The New York Times dated October 9, 1903. It says,'The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians in from one million to ten million years'. On the right is a quote from Orville Wright's diary, dated October 9, 1903. 'We started assembly today' it says.

But what looked like a more diverse and open media world, where anyone could be a reporter or reach an audience, is turning into one where a very few companies control the information pipelines.

It's ironic that while we enjoy easier access to information than ever before, we are falling behind in real knowledge. We are replacing books with blogs, and essays with tweets.

Google at the end of 2013 had a market cap six times that of General Motors while having one-fifth as many American workers.

The ancient writer Suetonius tells the story that an inventor around 70 CE displayed to a Roman emperor a machine that could move columns, only to be dismissed with the objection that such labor-saving devices would cause the poor to starve by robbing them of employment.

Access to useful information also was determined by literacy and the availability of reading material. It is now widely agreed at least for Britain that increases in literacy were relatively modest during the Industrial Revolution. Yet literacy is not particularly useful unless people actually read, and for the purposes of technological change it also matters how much and what people read.

I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do with twenty hours a week than sit in front of a video screen? Folks, this ain't normal. Can't we unplug already?

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.

a pleasing geometric pattern maximising firegrid interceptions,

The problem with sentient AIs, Kaspowitz said often, was that you could never trust anything they said as genuine. All was calculation for effect.

The technology itself was blameless. The people who used it, sometimes less so.

If you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important.

If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.

Satellite images, maps and blueprints of the whole world, of every city. We could look it up and know what's there in someone else's words. Or we could get wicked drunk and just go.

Inom några decennier kommer minnesproblem och hjärnsjukdomar kunna vara minnen blott. Blinda kommer att se, döva att höra och förlamade att gå.

The difference between being online and being physically among people, I saw in that moment, is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it's never satisfying.

Tristan [Harris] believes that what we are seeing is 'the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines'. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.

The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.