Technology Quotes

We are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill.

~ Marc Goodman

When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.

~ Peter Thiel

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.

~ David Pearce

Director of Ensuring the Future

~ Dave Eggers

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

~ Nikola Tesla

The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.

~ James S.a. Corey

Now comes the reign of iron — and cased sloops are to take the place of wooden ships.

~ John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

~ Gary Shteyngart

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

~ Edward Teller

The woman was simply leaving us alone with our future, the future she wouldn't be a part of. She didn't know how to do it or what it was, but she was trying to give it to us.

~ Austin Grossman

What will we be doing, when everything that can be done, can be done better by robots?

~ Humberto Contreras

Technology enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet.

~ Carl Honoré

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

~ Alberto Manguel

The weakest link in any chain of security is not the technology itself, but the person operating it; iron gates have no compassion to appeal to, nor fears to exploit, nor insecurities to use to one’s advantage. They are, however, operated by us – by beings of unlimited vulnerability and limited energy. Why waste time brute-forcing what can be easily circumvented by a clever façade and a crimson tongue?

~ A.j. Darkholme

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

~ Sherry Turkle

We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.

~ Jeremy Glass

Language is still separating us even though technology is bringing us closer together.

~ Suzy Kassem

Logic, like science, must be the servant and not the master of man.

~ Winston S. Churchill

Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Meeting, for the first time in person, someone that you’ve ‘known’ for sometime online = Taking the relationship to the ‘previous’ level.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.

~ Virginia Heffernan

in these shitty plastic days ...

~ Gillian Flynn

…I’m afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important… it’s almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they’re robots and forget altogether that they’re real, living people… but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that’s why I’m afraid for the world,” Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.“So am I… but I’ll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they’ll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards,” Alecto explained. “I’m sure that they’ll be able to realize how wrong it all is… even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

Human cultures construct an enormous variety of environments through language, technology, and institutions. We are born in and die in these systems of symbols and imagination.

~ William E. Paden

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!

~ William Crookes

Without the dreamers who write science fiction and other imaginary material we'd still be sitting in caves ... if we weren't already extinct.

~ William C. Samples

Without risks my friends there is no progress, no advancement either in science or technology.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Our society has long treated men as machines, as bodies expendable in the name of progress or profit. Men have overruled their pain and soul's delight, taught to think of themselves as mechanisms. Such an estrangement wounds very deeply; it has gone on so long and is so taken for granted that healing individuals, let alone a whole gender, is a dubious undertaking. But the beat goes on, the Saturnian shadow lives, the only game in town, and shame on the defector. The wounding is institutionalized and sanctified, and men unwittingly collude in their own crucifixion.

~ James Hollis

But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology.

~ Max Born

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that we're number one.

~ Fareed Zakaria

The mobile phone acts as a cursor to connect the digital and physical.

~ Marissa Meyer

I pick my technology like I picked my husband. It has to complement, not complicate, my life.

~ Amber Hurdle

Online Faxing - A tool that does one thing and it does it well-ifaxapp

~ Andy Fax

Despite the modern equipment we sell, it's old money that funds it, and old money doesn't always have a modern brain attached to it.

~ Taylin Clavelli

Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great

~ James C. Collins

The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.

~ Ryan Boudinot

If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.

~ Sean Silcoff

Nothing happens to a business growth until someone sells its product.

~ David W. Wang

Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

~ Scott Adams