Quotes About Technology

For the influenza pandemic that erupted in 1918 was the first great collision between nature and modern science. It was the first great collision between a natural force and a society that included individuals who refused either to submit to that force or to simply call upon divine intervention to save themselves from it, individuals who instead were determined to confront this force directly, with a developing technology and with their minds.

Askade took the battertoast, looked at it blearily. "I can't rewire it into a death ray without some extra parts," he said, and took a bite. "Hm. Tastes okay. What's the problem?

Unlike then, the mail stream of today has diminished by such things as e-mails and faxes and cell phones and text messages, largely electronic means of communication that replace mail.

This century has been so rich in discovery and so packed with technical innovation that it is tempting to believe that there can never be another like it. That conceit betrays the poverty of our collective imagination.

Design matters a lot when it is leveraged with a deep understanding of computation and the unique set of possibilities it brings.

The problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make the world more humane again.

I've come to realize, however, that while technology may make it more convenient to communicate, it doesn't improve our ability to get a point across.

But to ask a computing device to stop gathering information and to stop sharing it with other devices is like wishing away all the magic in your magic wand.

What will happen if our labor is no longer needed? If jobs for warehouse workers, garbage collectors, doctors, lawyers, and journalists are displaced by technology?

Gradually, he began to understand that the AI community was actually his philosophical enemy. After all, their vision was to replace humans with machines, while he wanted to extend and empower people.

I believe that sociable technology will always disappoint because it promises what it can't deliver," Turkle writes. "It promises friendship but can only deliver 'performances.' Do we really want to be in the business of manufacturing friends that will never be friends?

When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the benefit of any of the history and the research that had gone before it.

He offered his readers a quick tour of Vannevar Bush's Memex system and spent several pages discussing "associative linking" possibilities, a notion that was to serve as the forerunner of hypertext and led three decades later to the World Wide Web.

The separation of the fields of AI and human-computer interaction, or HCI, is partly a question of approach, but it's also an ethical stance about designing humans either into or out of the systems we create.

There was an abyss between the original work done by Engelbart's group in the sixties and the motley crew of hobbyists that would create the personal-computer industry beginning in 1975.

between 2007 and 2012 the U.S. workforce gained 387,000 managers while losing almost two million clerical jobs.

Dozens of the world's best computer scientists began their careers at SAIL. More than half a dozen companies including Foonly, Imagen, Xidex, Vicarm, Valid Logic, Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC, and Cisco Systems can trace their technology either directly or indirectly to SAIL.

While he had once been interested in Ayn Rand, he added, he increasingly viewed her laissez-faire capitalist worldview as old thinking. Now the ideas of Buckminster Fuller—pro-technology, with a deep faith that the coming of computerization and automation would result in an infinite abundance that would arrive shortly—were increasingly appealing to him.

There is a fundamental distinction, however, between approaches to designing technology to benefit humans and designing technology as an end in itself. Today, that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.

as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.

We are looking for development partners, people to work alongside us, which will accelerate our actually getting licences, the technology into product, into the markets.

Technology has been, and always will be, my one true passion professionally.