Quotes About Technology

If agricultural efficiency had remained the same over the past fifty years while the world grew the same amount of food, an area the size of the United States, Canada, and China combined would have had to be cleared and plowed.

technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that "over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.

A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled "Keep the Boy in School": The

It's not immediately obvious why, out of all the weapons of war, poison gas was singled out as uniquely abominable—as so uncivilized that even the Nazis kept it off the battlefield.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.

For returning "washday" to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.

If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a "Nikon vs. Canon" Internet discussion group.)

The zero-sum nature of the medieval economy was reinforced by a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.

and Twitter hashtag #firstworldproblems and in a monologue by the comedian Louis C.K. known as "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy":

Among the reasons there was no such crisis was that cathode-ray tubes were superseded by liquid crystal displays made of common elements.

The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios.

There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power.

What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls "the enlightened economy.

To appreciate this burden, one doesn't have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions

The fact that mean measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is ok. That the environment got better by itself or that we can just sit back and relax for the cleaner environment that we enjoy today, we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulation, treaties and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.

According to the National Safety Council, the horse-associated fatality rate was ten times the car-associated rate of modern times [in 1974, which is more than double the per capita rate today—SP].45

Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with.

it's time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to an ascetic harmony with nature.

We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.

People in a connected world are exposed to the stories of strangers through many channels, including face-to-face encounters, interviews in the media, and memoirs and autobiographical accounts.

aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17

For every job lost to automation, a new one will materialize that we cannot anticipate: he unemployed forklift operators will retrain as tattoo removal technicians and video game costume designers and social media content moderators and pet psychiatrists.

century, the amount of life that people lost to housework—which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time—fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011.13 Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.14 For returning "washday" to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.