Quotes About Progress

But practice pares back the impossible

pronounced. Spontaneous improvement no longer seemed likely. Behavioral therapy had

imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote - the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that none may pass. Ah, but engineers have no use for the past, do they?

The game's best AIs are smarter than last year's interplanetary probes. Play becomes the engine of human growth. But

La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural

Does it bother you, to be such a destroyer of productivity?" Neelay gazes out on a patch of mountain shaved bare half a century ago. "I don't think . . . It might not be so bad, to destroy a little productivity.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.

1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

What do I do now, for the next forty years? What work can't the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?

Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War

Science grew out of the craft tradition

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It

what mankind must do to save itself is to launch an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth. On this task he thought the energies of mankind could be concentrated and the need for heroism could be satisfied.

The technology that made possible long-distance pipeline construction was electric arc welding.

A Canadian physician and entrepreneur named Abraham Gesner pioneered the development of coal oil, initially as a source of coal gas for lighting.

If destructive technology amplifies violence, constructive technology amplifies compassion, and the lessons of technology are universal.

Adding to the smoke of burning coal, from about the middle of the eighteenth century, the "dark Satanic mills" of William Blake's 1808 poem "Jerusalem" began strewing their blight across England's green and pleasant land.

From 1788 onward, the quantity of iron England produced doubled every eight or ten years, an early industrial version of Moore's law.10 What major product did England manufacture from all that iron? Nails, says Samuel Smiles, the Victorian chronicler, "nails of iron made with pit coal."11 It was still a wooden world, the craftsman's essential tool a hammer.

In the meantime, Gesner kept busy perfecting kerosene. The crude coal oil that emerged from his stills smoked badly when it burned and smelled worse. After treating the oil with acids and processing it with lime, he succeeded in creating a kerosene that burned, he reported, "with a brilliant white light [and] without smoke or the naphthalous odor so offensive in many hydrocarbons having some resemblance to this but possessing very different properties.

The railroad, when it came, would meet high expectations. It came quickly enough, but before the necessary technologies converged into a successful system, variety flourished. Passengers were first carried on 25 March 1807 on the Oystermouth Tramroad on the Gower Peninsula in Swansea, northwest of Cardiff in Wales. The cars were horse-drawn, and the operator paid tolls to the company that owned the road.