Quotes About Technology

Once he had identified the new new thing, all he needed was some really smart, passionate engineers to chase after it and make it happen.

the utilitarians. They were interested only in the computer's crude and brutish ability to impose its will on the world around it.

is the ceding of technical and scientific leadership to China. It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions. And in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

began by pointing out the small mountain of research that suggested that expert judgment was less reliable than algorithms.

As yet, there is no final reckoning of the wealth the Valley has created. Hundreds of billions of dollars, certainly; perhaps even trillions. In any case, 'The greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet,' as one local capitalist puts it. The

It was troubling to consider, he began, "an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of the jungle rat being given the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons." Given

Of the roughly $9 billion spent each year by the Commerce Department, $5 billion goes to NOAA, and the bulk of that money is spent, one way or another, on figuring out the weather. Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

there is no name for what he's looking for, which, typically, is a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability. The new new thing.

A driver talking on a cell phone was four times as likely as a driver who wasn't to be involved in a crash, whether or not he held the phone in his hands

In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; now the average farmer feeds about 155 other people.

One piece of bad luck was rapid technical change, which was a weapon that oddball upstarts could use against the enormous gray corporations.

The Valley was a little experiment of capitalism with too much capital.

The man who groped for the new new thing was in many ways ill suited for mainstream business.

Someone once said that the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clark now had the best magic act in Silicon Valley. The best magic act attracted many of the best engineers. In the Valley it often did. The Valley had given engineers a place where they could make their living outside the enormous gray corporations that expected them to conform. It

Clark had invented the technology, bet his career on it, and been right. He had attracted the most talented engineers in Silicon Valley to his company, and they in turn created the most talented computers.

The sensors measured everything that Clark could think to measure, including the pressure on the engine. They passed these measurements up to the programmable logic controllers. The

genomic sequencing

The initial promise of computer technology was to remove the intermediary from the financial market, or at least reduce the amount he could scalp from that market. The reality turned out to be a windfall for financial intermediaries—of somewhere between $10 billion and $22 billion a year, depending on whose estimates you wanted to believe.

I'm sure in some way the neurosystem will one day be integrated with the computer," said Clark.

nurse at a VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas, had the bright idea of using bar codes on patients and medications to match them up

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

Once you were let into the Great Society of Sand Hill Road, you were given first crack at these miraculous enterprises at a small fraction of the cost to Wall Street investment bankers—never mind the general investing public.

The VCs could tolerate companies' going bust—they had so many of them—but they could not tolerate missing out on the new new thing.