Quotes About Technology

we can regard the human soul as a form of computer program, a program running on a wet computer we call the human brain.

On the other hand, venting one's frustrations at the keyboard typically produces a more impressive performance.

What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.

Magazines and newspapers used to think of themselves as something coherent--an issue, an edition, an institution. Not as the publisher of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. They believe that they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine—to redirect the trajectory of human evolution.

Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it.

tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation

we're constantly watched and always distracted

When Page describes Google reshaping the future of humanity, this isn't simply a description of the convenience it provides; what it aims to redirect is the course of evolution, in the Darwinian sense of the word. It's not too grandiose to claim that they are attempting to create a superior species, a species that transcends our natural form.

Philosophy couldn't emancipate the mind, but technology just might. Google has set out to succeed where Descartes failed, except that it has jettisoned all the philosophical questions that rattled around in his head. Where Descartes emphasized skepticism and doubt, Google is never plagued by second-guessing. It has turned the liberation of the brain into an engineering challenge—an exercise that often fails to ask basic questions about the human implications of the project.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow.

world in which we're constantly watched and always distracted.

In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we're really setting policies.

The Hoover experiment, in the end, hardly realized the happy fantasies about the Engineer King. A very different version of this dream, however, has come to fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies. We're not ruled by engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in American life, the highest, most influential tier of our elite.

We're watched on the Internet so that companies can more effectively sell us goods. The fact that Internet surveillance isn't totalitarian, however, doesn't mean that it does us no harm. We're watched so that we can be manipulated.

Each pathbreaking innovation promises to liberate technology from the talons of the monopolists, to create a new network so democratic that it will transform human nature. Somehow, in each instance, humanity remains its familiar self. Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it.

But there's another way to describe the convenience of the machine: It is the surrender of free will—algorithms make choices for us.

If you can laugh into the telephone, you must be a very accomplished telephonist. The very thought of the telephone makes me forget laughter.

I think as far as the music industry is concerned, it's kind of been the wild, wild West in a way with the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing to me.

The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in.

A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.

I moved about 45 minutes from West Hollywood, and I live surrounded by nature and the wilderness, but I constantly find myself walking around, like in the commercial, saying, 'Can you hear me now?'

Most of the time in the 21st century, we dominate our surroundings: We tweak the thermostat, and the temperature falls one degree. We push a button, and Taylor Swift sings for us. It's the opposite in the wilderness, which teaches us constantly that we are not lords of the universe but rather building blocks of it.

Humans pull together in an odd way when they're in the wilderness. It's astonishing how few people litter and how much they help one another. Indeed, the smartphone app to navigate the Pacific Crest Trail, Halfmile, is a labor of love by hikers who make it available as a free download.