Quotes About Technology

Most Londoners did not know that, on average, their likenesses were transmitted forty times a day as they commuted to and from work, ran errands between buildings or simply window-shopped. The cameras were a legacy of IRA terrorism.

Y2K was the dud of all duds.

Facebook'?" he asks. "Seriously? Now we're using that piece of self-absorbed crap as an investigative tool? What's wrong with your generation?" "Nothing that we can't fix once your generation is gone.

cell finally finds service outside of Fruitland and I pull the BMW over to make some calls. First

What happened to the days when everyone was on the same page because what we saw and read was handed to us?

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power. Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle

Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion.

Dried-up carcasses of animals and humans alike—for to mechs they were alike

But then, why did the mechs have no religion?

One could copy a Self without knowing what it was. Just record it, like a musical passage; the machine which did that did not need to know harmony, structure.

English officer came striding across the field quite deliberately. He stopped, saluted with a ramrod spine, and said, "Arthur Clarke. I gather you're the men who brought us those superbombs. I'd like to shake your hands." Karl found him an agreeable fellow, a bit younger and brimming with ideas.

At ten kilohertz?

Once we wandered a free Earth, carrying a picture of our God or king to ensure safe passage. Now the world is gated, and we carry pictures of ourselves, and nobody's safe.

The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11.

Notre Dame and Sydney - that was nothing. Notre Dame doesn't have a police station; it is not 1,000 or so feet high. It was a public structure, very easy to access. And Sydney Harbour Bridge was half-and-half: a bridge, in the middle of the night. The World Trade Center was the end of the world. Electronic devices, police dogs.

Wealth today has been created by a world view dominated by fast-moving networks, open information, bottom-up entrepreneurialism.

How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?

Facebook is not ideologically neutral. In fact, it emerges from a very particular world view which we can trace back to Hobbes. I discovered this by examining the profile of Zuckerberg's fellow board members who, unlike him, are a very interesting bunch and, I suspect, the real power behind the poster boy.

Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens' emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.

Pesticides came about after the first world war. Some brainy petrochemical money maker said, 'Hey, that mustard gas worked great on people, maybe we could dilute it down and spray it on our crops to deal with pests.'

These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges.

We learned the value of research in World War II.

Nine g's is good, if the pilot can stand it. We couldn't stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II.

The advent of electronically synthesized sound after World War II has unquestionably had enormous influence on music in general.