Technology Quotes - Page 12

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right a single experiment can prove me wrong.

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.

In the imposition of a unitary and homogeneous popular culture, disseminated now throughout the world by the spread of Western technology and communications, is to be found one of the central features of modernity's distinctive way of achieving the priority of the one over the many. Homogeneity derives from the creation of an undifferentiated social or other reality...It is not therefore the priority of the many that distinguishes modernity from other cultures, but the shape the priority of the one takes in practice. Thus both the ancient and modern eras, in so far as they can be distinguished in the way often attempted, share in a tendency to elevate the one over the many: to enslave the many to the heteronomous rule of the one. The pathos of the modern condition is that, after rejecting what it rightly sees to be the oppressive forms of unity deriving from the past, it has itself succumbed to various false universals that replicate or even exacerbate the bondage from which it had hoped to free itself.

If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every day, I transact half my correspondence by means of it, but I don’t understand it. Think of that little stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating in your ear not only sounds, but words—not only words, but all the most delicate and elusive inflections and nuances of tone which separate one human voice from another!

Connecting products to the Web will be the 21st century electrification.

Technology would have long ago made privacy impossible, except that this had only made it more precious and desirable--and in the close confines of starship life, respect for another's privacy had become a powerful tradition.

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

Perhaps the strangest manifestation of the Eurocentric approach to the history of military technology is ... the attempt to discern fundamental cultural roots in the distant past that have resulted in the perceived current Western dominance of the world. This essentialism attempts to contrast ancient Greek logic and philosophy with the less rationally minded philosophies of the non-West. Modern science and technology, in this view, is a simple jump from ancient Greece to early modern Europe.

These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.

As both the Mercury and Apollo programs have shown our science and technology are so powerful that if an intense effort is made we can do almost anything we want in say ten years - provided we are not in conflict with the laws of nature.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.

Curiously, only in sports do we agree to eschew technological advances, making rules, for example, to limit the power potential of baseball bats. We understand that technology will ruin our games, but we do not understand that it can also ruin cultures.

Technology is grey. More technology, less colors. We're building a world with colors only in poems.

No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.

Smartphones are tools which fools fiddle with when they are around people that they don’t have the courage, or, the intellect, to converse with.

A dream with a deadline is a goal.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

Science and technology were the only keys to opening the door to the future, and people approached science with the faith and sincerity of elementary school students.

It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.

I believe, given enough time, all of engineering will move to paradigms based on the biological cell.

You have such an odd relationship to your environment," mused the man. "Such a paranoid relationship. You seem intent on existing in smaller and smaller spaces, filled with more and more gadgets, with the mistaken impression that this will give you more control over your lives. There's something a little impious about it.""Nothing wrong with gadgets," muttered Alif."No, except that they're not magic," said the man, "and a lot of you seem to believe they should be.

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate.

Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the chirp of the tree frog, ceaselessly bleating our identities while the frog-eating bats hover above us.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Using Facebook is like taking a Dyson to your spare time.

There are two types of people in this world: those whose look for opportunity and those who make it happen.

CEOs will gladly overpay for a company if the acquisition enables them to keep their jobs.

The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "A realm of intimate, personal power is developing- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.

Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we are easily bored.

Being forever available to the rest of the world is overrated. I mean, what are 'missed calls' invented for?

Our focus should not be on emerging technologies, but on emerging cultural practices.

What if Theater was the Pong of the the digital Ping?A place where the live experience has an function?

Computers are heaven-sent when they work and hell-spawn when they don't.There's just not much middle ground when it comes to technology.

I hate technology. It provides so many different channels of loneliness. Every time you check your email and don’t see a new message, you know that, even though people have the ability to contact you at any time of the day from anywhere on the planet, no one is interested in doing so. Phones are constant reminders that 160 people you know fairly well have nothing to say to you most of the time.

One of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight.

To speak of television as 'neutral' and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns.

Software will give you respect, but hardware will give you the Power.

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

I am Become Text Message. Destroyer Of Words.

The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.

When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

Radical space technologies never reach the public because unknown groups do not wish humanity to have access to the highest knowledge or the most advanced scientific inventions. Perhaps this suppression is out of fear that the masses may be able to explore our Solar System and the Universe beyond it. Whatever the case, it seems they want us to stay at ignorant levels forever.

Some upstarts always try to get closer to the source of creation by ascending to the source's level. The story of Icarus is of course a parable about the folly of such an effort. Get too close to the sun and your hubris will get you burned. Yet in the eyes of twenty-first-century capitalist culture, which worships at the twin altars of the individual and technology, Icarus had initiative. And his melted wings do not represent some deep character flaw; he just needed better beta testers.

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

Could we can have developer acceptance criteria?

Every new generation believes its own period to be absolutely superior intellectually - greater than all past cultures yet equal among its modern cultures.

I was born on the cusp of technology.

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Anything you can do, but the computer can do it better than you. That's not a skill!

A tap is a zero-length swipe.

Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.

Creating back doors to hack in to secure devices will not only undermine consumer confidence in technology but most importantly empower cyber criminals and totalitarian regimes.

[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways

The cost of electrons and photons is getting cheaper all the time!