Quotes About Progress

T]he social canons and methods by which people build up instinct controls in their communal life are not brought into being deliberately; they evolve over long periods, blindly and without plan. Irregularities and contradictions in drive-controls, huge fluctuations in their severity or leniency, are therefore among the recurrent structural features of the civilizing process.

Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers.

As to the inventions of printing and of paper, we generally consider these in the wrong oredr, attributing too much importnace to printing and too little to paper.

Can man-made machines learn and can they reproduce themselves? We shall try to show in this chapter that in fact they can learn and can reproduce themselves, and we shall give an account of the technique needed for both these activities.

there aren't missing links—there's a missing chain!

Laying a good foundation is important, but the fact remains that we don't live in the foundation; we live in the house built upon it. In that house where daily life is lived, things are not always as they should be.

For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us - excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over.

Fifty percent of something is better than than one hundred percent of nothing.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really "need" anything new, so we only create what we want.

I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as the sport of the future since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.

We're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It's a mistake that never stops being made.

In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.

If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren't soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.

The primacy of a landline connection dictated how life was lived, with such deep-rooted universality that its role in shaping humanity was virtually unconsidered. It was the single most important feature of every home, and nobody cared.

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option.

the dissonance between the public sensitivity to genetic engineering and the actual progress being made can be seen as a signpost for the modern anti-science movement in Western culture.