Quotes About Technology

The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which

Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE.

male astronauts had been fitted with condom catheters, but these were always threatening to leak or even burst and obviously wouldn't work for women. To everyone's relief, a NASA engineer created an extra-absorbent polymer and worked it into a diaper that could be worn by all. (In the bargain he'd anticipated

What they are is a small tablet about six inches square, which has a screen in it. As you walk it shows a scrolling digital map of the area you're in, telling you what each store you pass sells, who lives in what block, the whole works, updated by small beacons on every street corner. If you tap in a destination the screen shows you a red line to follow, and the tablet whispers at you to tell you when to make a turn.

Let them come. We've got helicopters, tanks, jets, and big guns. We've got armies of robots. What do they have but their stench and the squalor they live in?

People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.

early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips

Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets.

Schwartz said that several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. "You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.

Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner?

I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley

a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells' nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place—and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is—the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. That's it? That's it.

GMO seed is just the latest chapter in an old story: Farmers eager to increase their yields adopt the latest innovation, only to find that it's the companies selling the innovations who reap the most from the gain in the farmer's productivity.

the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel.

Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)

there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.

Lawns, I am convinced, are a symptom of, and a metaphor for, our skewed relationship to the land. They teach us that, with the help of petrochemicals and technology, we can bend nature to our will. Lawns stoke our hubris with regard to the land.

Too often, the music business allowed third-party companies to innovate for us - and that simply does not work anymore.

With lab courses, we may be able to simulate a lot of that and reduce costs.

Within our lifetimes, we will be able to push out enough computational power to simulate reality.

I'm interested in the ideas that sound a little crazy, such as radical life extension, curing cancer, being able to create a simulation of the human brain and map every neuron.

The Blue Brain project expects to have a full human-scale simulation of the cerebral cortex by 2018. I think that's a little optimistic, actually, but I do make the case that by 2029 we will have very detailed models and simulations of all the different brain regions.

I grew up playing simulation games - that's the foundation of my racing career.