Quotes About Technology

As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.

Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.

America and Britain were working on the bomb together, at astonishing scientific speed and in deepest secrecy. Neither was helping, or informing, its other main ally, the Soviet Union. But Moscow was secretly obtaining that help anyway, through its spies. Not only did Stalin know all about the bomb, but he knew that Britain and America did not know he knew (which is the gold dust of intelligence). And he demanded that his spies find out more.

Video killed the radio stars, and digital killed the old 'inkies'. (Ben Macintyre writing in The Times about the death of the New Musical Express (NME) in print.)

We have the scanners, we have MaherSter. Now, you stop poling your horses and pray for the wicked."

You still had to use the Balkanized, legacy banking system, which was built before the internet even existed, littered with middlemen and rent-seekers all along the way. And only if the central authorities of this network allowed it to happen, would your money move at a snail's pace from point A to point B.

Zuckerberg had gotten lucky—in another world, the twins never would have had to approach him for coding help. In any event, Tyler and Cameron didn't believe they were on the earth to exist; they were here to create, to build.

Silicon Valley was a town made up of engineers who thought in frameworks, decision trees, and game theory.

Centuries of being attached to the machine had atrophied the languages of the earth.

Algorithms are listening to us. At the very least we should try to listen better than we are being listened to.

Social networking technology didn't really exist until 2004-2005. I had the idea to use this technology to bridge this gap between a general interest in addressing social issues and the practical action.

Making a robot that simulates what a human does has value, but I'm more attracted to making supertools that dramatically amplify human abilities by a hundred- or thousand-fold.

Electricity gave rise to elevators, light bulbs, telegraphs and telephones, recent inventions that made working in a tower possible, along with heating and ventilation systems. The skyscraper was a machine as much as it was a building, the culmination of nineteenth-century technology.

Entonces no había periódicos, y las ideas políticas, así como las noticias, circulaban de viva voz, desfigurándose entonces más que ahora, porque siempre fue la palabra más mentirosa que la imprenta.

There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense as that 10,000 men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?

in 1742, invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering,

It's really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have lots of time. Elsewhere, you're too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won't have to work so hard.

Not long ago scientists figured out a way to create mathematical constructs of patients' hearts.

A word about TV: If a television is on, an infant will stare at it. This is not a sign of advanced development. TV entertains at a cost. Young children easily become dependent on the TV for stimulation and lose some of their natural drive to explore. A child with a plastic cup and spoon, a few wooden blocks, and a board book can think up fifty creative ways to use those objects; a child in front of a TV can only do one thing.

Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.

Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel.

Television is a performance, but apps actually reflect thought processes.