Quotes About Technology

The Daily Show reported recently that scientists in Japan had invented a robot that is capable of recognizing its own reflection in a mirror. When the robot learns to hate what it sees, said Jon Stewart, it will have achieved full humanity.

If posthuman self-alteration is not folded into an aesthetic of self-cultivation, then it will only be answerable to the programs of large corporations.

I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.

At present, the best low-carbon source is nuclear.

Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly. - Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 216.

The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. The familiar one is natural-system restoration, which may be better framed as megagardening—

Form follows funding.

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. This trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.

The temptation to customize a building around a new technology is always enormous, and it is nearly always unnecessary. Technology is relatively lightweight and flexible—more so every decade. Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you're not pushed around when the next technology comes along.

Better catch up with reality. You're missing the boat. Time's going to come when computers will do everything." "I have trouble believing that. It just seems so unlikely ." "You're not a believer like the rest of us. The day will come when ten-year-olds will master these machines and you'll be at their mercy.

Unplug yourself often and you risk losing touch with your feelings altogether.

One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation.

Robert Putnam notes in his seminal book on the loss of social connection in Western societies, Bowling Alone, "Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it: without a real world counterpart, Internet contact gets ranty, dishonest and weird." We

It merely suggests that we stop wasting time hating technology and redirect that energy towards loving nature instead.

Hardly anyone knew what country had first landed men on the moon, despite the fact that they were science and technology majors. Asked what year computers had been invented, most had no idea; it was only after much consultation that one team ventured a guess: 1870.

Taoism has fostered both material and mental progress, both technological development and awareness of the potential dangers of that very development, always striving to encourage balance between the material and spiritual sides of humankind.

I think something quite dreadful has been happening to criticism in the arts, particularly in America, during the last twenty years. In an age which is so much dominated by technological advance, the methods and even the jargon of science and engineering have mistakenly been adopted not only by fringe disciplines like psychology and social studies but by many arts scholars who should have known better. from In Defense of the Artist in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983)

Not that kind of proof, Kyber. Come on, Buck Rogers got a ride in a flying car, and all I get is a slide show and a history lesson? It's going to take more than this to convince me that I slept for almost two centuries.

The last time I dated, dinosaurs roamed the earth. We didn't even have electricity.

to the GPS system. It greeted her in French.

She pulled a laptop out of her backpack and booted it.

David? she asked as they approached an elevator. She was a little uncertain about doors that opened and closed by themselves and little boxes that went up and down. She supposed she'd just have to cope. Yes? he asked. She rested her head on his shoulder. How should we celebrate our eight hundredth wedding anniversary? Hmm? How about with a good night's sleep? Suits me. Together they walked into the little moving box.

Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.