Quotes About Progress

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

For me personally, the technology that has taken the most unexpected turn in my lifetime is what I refer to as 'the device formerly known as the cell phone.' I still remember many predictions that by 2000 there would only be about a million cell phone users. Boy, were they ever wrong!

When I started out in Facebook, it had only 20 people. I saw it grow to a thousand employees and from five million users to over a billion users. I saw it evolve from a service that served college students to one that served the world.

Our users are trapeze artists, high school football coaches - I got cornered by a couple of theoretical physicists who said Dropbox lets them collaborate across the world and share their experiments' results. They were raving about how it's driving their research.

It is users that are driving the networks with innovations on top of the networks and with innovations in the devices space. This is very healthy.

We have millions of users around the globe who do amazing things with our technology every day.

We don't really talk about our future plans. But we, at the same time, try to build things that our users ask us for.

Over the last 20 years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here's the thing: You don't start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.

There is no more reason to think that they expected the world to remain static than there is to think that any of us holds a crystal ball. The only way to create a foundational document that could stand the test of time was to build in enough flexibility that later generations would be able to adapt it to their own needs and uses.

I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. A new technology helps to fuel the economy, and any discussion of slowing its growth has to take account of economic consequences. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology.

It is important to recognise that, alongside the huge benefits that artificial intelligence offers, there are potential ethical issues associated with some uses.

The functional uses of machines and innovative computer programs is not to isolate us but, rather, to promote coexistence. If used properly, it brings us together, granting unimaginable opportunities, magnifying the most quintessential and exclusively human capabilities.

The automobile is technologically more sophisticated than the bundling board, but the human motives in their uses are sometimes the same.

It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses.

I think if the average person that uses AOL can't physically see the changes in the company, we've failed.

On climate and clean energy, government sets the international framework, and the private sector uses that framework to do what it does best: innovate, create, and drive global progress.

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

We're trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better.

We don't want to leave the coal in the ground, and that necessarily is going to involve better technology with regard to clean uses of coal.

To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that binary.

I've never looked down on anyone who uses the system, but I believe that it's a temporary station in life and that we should all work toward getting off it. And once we get off it, we should pay back to that system.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.