Quotes About Technology

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

Consider Science Fiction, since its formal inception as a romantic subgenre in this country in 1926 with the publication of the first issues of Hugo Gernsbeck's Amazing Stories has been known for its simple and melodramatic plots which demonstrates man's mastery (or later on loss of control of technology

For how can this be? How can it be? That from all the Ridgefield Parks of our time we will assemble to build the great engines which will take us to the stars... and some of the stars will bring death and others will bring life and then there are those which will bring us nothing at all, but the engines will continue, they will go on forever. And so, in a fashion, after our fashion, will we.

Science Fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effect of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history.

virtual katabasis.

The technological society has walked off the court, so to speak, but they've left all the basketballs behind. Someone will come along who remembers the game and teach it to the rest again.

If you drop a book into the toilet, you can fish it out, dry it off and read that book. But if you drop your Kindle in the toilet, you're pretty well done.

She pushed the button and like a miracle her head filled with the sound of Jerry Trupiano's voice… and more importantly, with the sounds of Fenway Park. She was sitting out here in the darkening, drippy woods, lost and alone, but she could hear thirty thousand people. It was a miracle.

A crazy certainty had arisen in his mind: a hand - or perhaps a claw - was going to swim up from the grayness of the Kindle's screen, grab him by the throat, and yank him in.

Compared with the 20 million motorcars in the United States, cars and trucks in the Soviet Union numbered perhaps 5,500

How many men have failed to stay intellectually sharp and so gave up ground in their professions to others with more active minds? How many have lost money through uninformed investments or have not taken opportunities in expanding fields or have missed promotions because they had not bothered to learn about new technologies or what changes social media, for example, would bring to their jobs?

With the dizzying rate of change in technology and increasing competition driven by the globalization of markets and technology, we must not only be educated, we must constantly re-educate and reinvent ourselves. We must develop our minds and continually sharpen and invest in the development of our competencies to avoid becoming obsolete.

Gagarin had just flown around the world. Now he needed a horse and cart. To those familiar with only slightly later TV footage of NASA spacecraft returning to earth [...] Gagarin's return is in a league of its own, an exercise of the surreal with a uniquely Russian twist.

What's that old saying? You can't outrun the radio ?

Nothing seemed sacred anymore. Facebook, Twitter, and every other social media site seemed proof positive of that. What no one would have ever yelled from their front porch to neighbors across the street was now posted for billions to see for all eternity. Still, he loved the internet. So much could be learned so fast with little effort and no fingerprints.

Communicating with the federal government is like talking to a computer that's crashing.

Nothing important should ever be more than two clicks away.

I'm imagining that paper books will evolve to become something akin to candles we have them in our homes and cherish their light but don't light our homes with them. Readers of Lincoln's era would likely be surprised at how well-lit our homes are and I think it's likely that we will be surprised at how well-read future book readers will be.

Let's suppose that you want to say, I am a jerk. IN the 18th century, you would have to go around person to person and utter the phrase individually to each one of them. However, here in the third millennium, with our advances in telephone communication, it is possible to say I am a jerk to a thousand people at a time by forgetting to turn off your cell phone and having it ring during a performance of Death of a Salesman.

A watched iPhone never syncs.

iPhone just synced perfectly with toaster. All is well.

There is no code so big, twisted, or complex that maintenance can't make it worse.

the automatic computer confronts us with a radically new intellectual challenge that has no precedent in our history. Of course software has become even more complex since 1989, and Dijkstra's ratio of 1 to 109could easily be more like 1 to 1015 today.