Quotes About Technology

I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.

We used to take two years to complete a film, and sometimes, we used to be told on the sets that the scenes are still being written. Everything today is pre-planned.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Internally, we're focused on building our own technology, leveraging all the momentum that's out there around wearable computing and mobile computing and PC computing. But at the end of the day, all the code we've written and all the invention we've created has been focused on our own tech and our own products.

Someone sent me an article on AI that was written by Tim Urban on the website Wait but Why - that was kind of where I stuck my toes in the puddle, and I said, 'OK, I've gotta learn about this!' I felt like this is one of those things that our generation is going to have to answer for, eventually, and I just wanted to educate myself on it.

In 2008, Bitcoin was mysteriously introduced to the world in an obscure, technical paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. By late 2013, the financial press was filled with reportage on Bitcoin and its dramatic price increase.

'Sunspring,' the first known screenplay written by an AI, was produced recently. It is awesome. Awesomely awful. But it's worth watching all ten minutes of it to get a taste of the gap between a great screenplay and something an AI can currently produce.

Generations of thinkers have made typewriters their frenemies, and long before there were Gmail inboxes, print correspondence stacked up, some hastily written and impulsive on the steel gadgets.

More modern poetry is written than read.

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.

There were challenges with production because of the special effects. There are just some things that, although written, special effects just isn't able to do.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.

The reason is that till date, in spite of advances in information technology and strategies of information, the written word in the form of books still remains one of humanity's most enduring legacies.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

Things go wrong for me all the time with technology. I'm not familiar enough with it, and I'm too old-school a brain to be able to figure it out. I'm dumb. Anything that I have to attack with my thumbs, for any period of time, makes me feel stupid. So, I try to avoid it, as much as possible, to protect my thumbs.

There is some risk that if the wrong regulatory regime gets adopted in the U.S., then the center of innovation could move to other countries. If blockchains are the next Internet, that would be a very unfortunate development for the U.S.

From 1999 to 2003 was the peak of equipment in ski racing. Since then, it's all gone in the wrong direction.

The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels.

Technology writers are seldom subject to frenzied, Beatlemania-esque paroxysms of public attention. June 29, 2007, was the exception. I was in the wrong place - Apple's Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan - with the right device. The iPhone.