Quotes About Technology

And I think it's bad when the most honest way a boy can look at a girl is through a camera.

Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That's the sky. If you're still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow.

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It's sort of a blog for people with attention spans.

Any religion whose messiah's name isn't recognized by Microsoft Word can't be that much of a threat.

Mitt Romney's email was hacked! So if you start getting messages that sound like they're from a bot, he's fixed the problem.

I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.

A critical fact in the world of 1801 was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef (or any beef on the hoof, for that matter), no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster.

A man whose birthday was in 1829 or earlier had been born into a world in which President Andrew Jackson traveled no faster than Julius Caesar, a world in which no thought or information could be transmitted any faster than in Alexander the Great's time.

The Americans of 1801 had more gadgets, better weapons, a superior knowledge of geography, and other advantages over the ancients, but they could not move goods or themselves or information by land or water any faster than had the Greeks and Romans.

In Jefferson's day, it took six weeks to move information from the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C. In Lincoln's, information moved over the same route by telegraph all but instantaneously.

1939 New York World's Fair

This is the point. One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators

My lifelong battle to control cabling began at this time. All the cables I have ever owned would stretch to the moon and back. Except they would not be able to because they would fail to connect up with each other. Anyone can write a story in which humans can teleport, travel in time and make themselves invisible A future in which there are cable compatibility standards, that would be real science fiction.

Alexander Graham Bell was said to have made the following entirely endearing remark soon after he had invented the telephone: 'I do not think I am exaggerating the possibilities of this invention,' he said, 'when I tell you that it is my firm belief that one day there will be a telephone in every major town in America.

I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fi in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.

We believe human begins have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history, because human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in it's mastery.

The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand time smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965.

Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

If so, we might be able to use them for rapid travel around the galaxy or travel back in time. Of course, we have not seen anyone from the future (or have we?) but I discuss a possible explanation for this.

But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System—and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure that wisdom wins.

Maybe it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive.

There has been relatively little change in human DNA in the last 10,000 years. But it is likely that we will be able to redesign it completely in the next thousand. Of course, many people will say that genetic engineering on humans should be banned. But I rather doubt that they will be able to prevent it. Genetic engineering on plants and animals will be allowed for economic reasons, and someone is bound to try it on humans.