Quotes About Technology

American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

This gap in understanding between books and screens is big enough that in elementary-school children, it's the equivalent of two-thirds of a year's growth in reading comprehension.

in a culture where people are not "getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings," and that is why we can't put down our smartphones, or bear to log off.

whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it's always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30 (£22), far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.

The internet arrived for most of us in the late 1990s, into a society where the middle class was starting to crumble and where financial insecurity was rising, and we were sleeping an hour less than people did in 1945. It would always have been hard to resist the sophisticated human-hacking of surveillance capitalism, but it appeared we were already getting weaker, and we were easier to hack than we would have been otherwise.

better techniques being discovered every week. One day, when we were walking in San Francisco, Tristan said to me: "Things look pretty bad from the outside, but when you're on the inside, things can look even worse." Tristan was starting to realize: It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

digital detox is 'not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn't the answer to pollution.

it has to begin with a bit of introspection, with a bit of understanding ourselves." Yes, he says, the environment changed: "You [the average tech user] didn't make the iPhone. It's not your fault. I never said it's your fault. I'm saying it's your responsibility. This stuff isn't going away. In some form or other, it's here to stay. What choice do we have? We have to adapt. That's our only option.

Are we going to stand up and fight invasive technologies or are we going to let them win by default?

The study found that 'technological distraction' – just getting emails and calls – caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.

The recent survey found that one in three British workers check their e-mails before 6.30 am, while 80% of British employers consider it acceptable to phone employees out of hours.

The web, by contrast, is "less than ten thousand days old.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 42.

The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

People were, [Tristan Harris] warned, living 'on a treadmill of continuous checking.

Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another.

Many Silicon Valley insiders predicted that it would only get worse. One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: "Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.

One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: "How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?" There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

one of my biggest learnings as a designer or technologist is—making something easy to use doesn't mean it's good for humanity.

As a society, we are dreaming less and less.

In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being - TV, radio, reading - it amounted to forty newspapers-worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. (I'd be amazed if it hadn't gone up further since then.) The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.

The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through "the Great Acceleration," and like Sune, he argues it's not simply our tech that's getting faster—it's almost everything. There's evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just twenty years, people have started to walk 10 percent faster in cities.

More speed means less comprehension.