Quotes About Technology

we haven't even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the tress had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.

Ship?" he called. "Yup?" said the ship. "Do what I do." The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.

He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds. The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything. It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalize its own defenses against the information's ever emerging.

For a moment or two the old man didn't reply. He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head whilst his house is burning down.

The three billion people weren't actually there, but they watched his every gesture through the eyes of a small robot tri-D camera which hovered obsequiously in the air nearby.

And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously forward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.

Life," said Marvin, "don't talk to me about life." He

Hitler's commitment to the V-2 advanced the pursuit of a moonshot by perhaps decades. Though Hitler had no expressed interest in reaching the moon, the uncomfortable fact is that the darkest shafts and foulest backwater of human savagery helped bring this loftiest of human dreams to reality.

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

I think computers ought to have a key called I'M DRUNK, and when you push it, it prevents you from sending email for twelve hours. I've got another one: a key called FUCK OFF. You press it every time your computer does something annoying -- in turn this would somehow force your computer to experience pain. And if you pushed SHIFT/FUCK OFF, you'd end up with FUCK OFF AND DIE, the computer equivalent of a razor being raked across your nipples.

LET'S JUST HOPE WE ACCIDENTALLY BUILD GOD.

What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.

We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we've erased; value adding; reconstructing the future.

When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write: [deletia] It stands for everything that's been lost.

The less of a life, the more mail you need

How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to ("country"—also, what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories.

These were citizens who, never having bothered to awaken to the technological and psychic changes in their world, hadn't bothered to defend themselves, hadn't bothered to build walls or plan counterattacks or build weapons-- asleep inside their collective dream, thinking for all the world that the unthinkable would never happen. Thinking they were safe.