Quotes About Technology

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you.

The Titanic woke them up. Never again would they be quite so sure of themselves. In technology especially, the disaster was a terrible blow. Here was the "unsinkable ship" -- perhaps man's greatest engineering achievement -- going down the first time it sailed. But it went beyond that. If this supreme achievement was so terribly fragile, what about everything else? If wealth mean so little on this cold April night, did it mean so much the rest of the year?

The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily.

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn't excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things." – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

Nobody has the right to expect a response to an email within an hour. It is not a valid expectation. People who do should be rebuked.

You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth.

The factory of the future will have two employees a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment.

But if we can't compete with technology when it comes to storing answers, questioning—that uniquely human capacity—is our ace in the hole. Until Watson acquires the equivalent of human curiosity, creativity, divergent thinking skills, imagination, and judgment, it will not be able to formulate the kind of original, counterintuitive, and unpredictable questions an innovative thinker—or even just your average four-year-old—can come up with.

Yes, we want a Silicon Valley," she said, "but do we really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?

Without husbands, women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they're willing to relocate and they're more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology.

Your son is more likely to seek a job in a sector that is being increasingly outsourced overseas- as with computer technology and manufacturing, as well as online jobs. Your daughter is more likely to hold jobs in stable sectors that are more recession proof, like health and education, both of which are 75 percent women.

Nineteen eighty-two is as good a year as any to mark the threshold of a future we're still negotiating. It's been called the information age, the digital age, the new media age. It was the beginning of the "digital turn" that would, in fits and starts, transform music culture . . . .

The human worker will go the way of the horse.

In the information age in which we live, technology has a way of selling us on convenience. If something can't be done electronically, we are not interested in doing it. But the bottom line for effective ministry must never be our own convenience. It takes blisters, commitment, and a willingness to go wherever the Lord leads us to get it done. This may be a foreign concept to some leaders;

As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.

I can build a hyperphase jump gate, I'm sure I could have figured sex out. Insert Tab M into Slot F. Repeat until done.

Testing LAN Neighbors with Standard Ping

The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.

The popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation.

Paulo plugged in the machine, which looked like the mutant offspring of a vacuum cleaner and a toaster oven, and showed them how to place wood chips in the bottom. Then he lit the wood chips with a long match and aimed the metal contraption at the opening of the hive. Puffs of smoke wafted around the hive and then blew straight in. Almost immediately the bees, which had been flying haphazardly around the room, raced back to the hive, and the buzzing inside grew louder and louder.

This is when we lost our humanity. I'd open my phone and look at my contacts and only one or two were still alive.