Quotes About Progress

If experience was so important, we'd never have had anyone walk on the moon.

Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth it for end users, however much fun it is for nerds.

Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.

Moving from radio to television, you can take most of the words with you.

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end."

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others…

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Deep and sustainable change...requires changes in behavior among those who do not welcome the change.

You have greater access to sanitation and clean water than ever before. To privacy, leisure, and artificial light. To transportation, communication, and computation. The list goes on and on.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. " —Arthur Schopenhauer "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct." —Niels Bohr, Nobel Laureate & Quantum Physics Pioneer

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" —Thomas Babington Macaulay, Review of Southey's Colloquies on Society

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

We go from liking something . . . to wanting it . . . to needing it. At the same time our drive to go after it is heightened considerably. "In nature, rewards take time and effort.

And while humanity is still barbaric in many ways, we've come a long way since Nazi Germany.

In 1996, Eastman Kodak was a hundred-year-old powerhouse with one hundred forty thousand employees and a valuation of twenty-eight billion dollars. Yet a mere sixteen years later, the company was filing for bankruptcy, a T. Rex dinosaur that had failed to fathom the disruptive power and game-changing impact of the digital photography revolution. In

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had famously expressed, "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, have ruined me. As

Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

A war for technology supremacy.

Runaway biological or electronic evolution that led to a singularity event.

Partially true. But a large part of aging is due to a form of planned obsolescence.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling