Quotes About Progress

We'll know that Google has truly fulfilled its vision when the Googleplex no longer needs toilets at all.

it has become almost impossible for us to imagine what life was like before electricity began to flow through the sockets in our walls.

Wayfaring becomes "an ongoing process of growth and development, or self-renewal." Transport, on the other hand, is "essentially destination-oriented.

To hold inventors liable for the misuse of their inventions is to indict progress itself. That's

Along Maine's Kennebec River alone, thirty-six companies operated fifty-three icehouses with a total capacity of a million tons. But over the next few decades, cheap electricity devastated the business, first by making the artificial production of ice more economical and then by spurring homeowners to replace their iceboxes with electric refrigerators. As Gavin Weightman writes in The Frozen-Water Trade, the "huge industry simply melted away.

the path of technological progress and its human consequences are determined not simply by advances in science and engineering but also, and more decisively, by the influence of technology on the costs of producing and consuming goods and services. A competitive marketplace guarantees that more efficient modes of production and consumption will win out over less efficient ones.

our longstanding idea of a computer is obsolete.

In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than "the sex organs of the machine world,

What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

In 1930, it hit 80 percent. Soon, it was over 90 percent. Only a handful of manufacturers, mainly those running big factories in remote locations, continued to produce their own current. Thanks to Samuel Insull, the age of the private power plant was over. The utility had triumphed.

That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper's article, that people would come to read "with the eyes shut." They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an "indispensable," which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines.

In programming the World Wide Computer, we will be programming our lives.

All technological change is generational change.

Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility:

Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google," he said in a 2000 interview, long before his company's name had become a household word. "We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.

What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges or diminishes us, how, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.

In the end, Adams believes, we "may come to regard tactical warfare as properly the business of machines and not appropriate for people at all."7

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Technology shapes economics, and economics shapes society.

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. —John M. Culkin

According to one estimate, the number of books produced in the fifty years following Gutenberg's invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years.

A hundred years ago, we arrived at such as moment with technologies that extend man's physical powers. We are at another such moment today with technologies that extend our intellectual power

The child mortality revolution has used vaccines, treatments for diarrhea, micronutrients, and improved nutrition to reduce the number of child deaths worldwide each year from 20 million in 1960 to 6.6 million today—even as the number of children has risen.

the single most important way to encourage women and girls to stand up for their rights is education, and we can do far more to promote universal education in poor countries.