Quotes About Technology

Ecstatic technology isn't limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly's early research established, it's the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.

Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger's device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals.

Encrypted digital watermarking," explains Balthazar. "Information gets hidden in information, like a code inside the pixels. Only visible with the right kind of key. It's called steganography. Here," pointing at the cylinder, "they're using a similar technique, but done at the nano-level, with DNA as the information carrier. GFP is green fluorescent protein, in this case jellyfish genes woven into the atoms of the metal. The heat from your hand is the key.

With this in mind, it is not inconceivable to say that there are people alive today who will live long enough to see their selves stored in silicon and thus, by extension, see themselves live forever.

When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It's the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?

By using the tanks to eliminate all distraction, entrain specific brainwaves, and regulate heart rate frequency, the SEALs are able to cut the time it takes to learn a foreign language from six months to six weeks.

That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.

As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

We never see a journalist saying to the camera, "I'm reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out"—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world's population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)

Strunk was born in 1869, and today's writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

it's a fallacy to think that people "need resources" in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want.

No system today can duplicate a person's ability to recognize both many words and many speakers. Perhaps the state of the art is a system called DragonDictate, which runs on a personal computer and can recognize 30,000 words.

The momentary confusion experienced by everyone in the vicinity when a cell phone rings and no one is sure if it is his/hers or not: conphonesion, phonundrum, ringchronicity, ringxiety, fauxcellarm, pandephonium.

The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history's saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.

In 1974, it cost $1,442 (in 2011 dollars) to fly from New York to Los Angeles; today it can be done for less than $300.

Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.

When robotic cars are ubiquitous, they could save more than a million lives a year, becoming one of the greatest gifts to human life since the invention of antibiotics.

Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society's norms.

I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005."43 (The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.)

A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn't exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.

However much one admires the improved views of the Boston waterfront, the lines of the stealth bomber, or the acting skills of Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, or indeed of the gorilla in King Kong, this still seems like a very good deal.

The ordering of events is in the right direction: technological advances in publishing, the mass production of books, the expansion of literacy, and the popularity of the novel all preceded the major humanitarian reforms of the 18th century.