Quotes About Advancement

A better age would have to follow.

You see, you keep learning. People are always looking for a single magic turning point. There isn't one. It's much more of a gradual getting better and better and better and better.

dirt, but the machine began to make

Small steps could make large journeys, if admittedly very slow ones.

But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages

History directing evolution.

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

Their moral influence will then do infinitely more to advance the true interests of religion, than any measures which they may call on Congress to enact.

Step by step, one by one, higher and higher. Step by step, rung by rung, climbing Jacob's ladder.

Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.

The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old.

Por qué? ¿Y por qué no tenemos plumaje ni alas, sino solamente omoplatos, las bases para las alas? Porque ya no necesitamos alas: porque tenemos aviones y las alas solamente nos estorbarían.

From the steam engine to the assembly line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it.

A ciência é o poder do ser humano.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

In the future, however, we may see real gaps in physical and cognitive abilities opening between an upgraded upper class and the rest of society.

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world?

Artificial intelligence is now poised to surpass human intelligence.

There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books.

AI might similarly help groom the best detectives, bankers, and soldiers in history.

Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – into Homo sapiens, who produce spaceships and computers.

Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?

The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.

The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.