quotations about technology
Technology: the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
MAX FRISCH
Homo Faber
When technology makes it perfect, art loses.
BRIAN ENO
Wired, January 1999
History demonstrates that the advancement of technology is not a steady upward curve. There are flat periods, upwards spurts, and even reversals.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this.
CORY DOCTOROW
The Guardian, May 31, 2017
Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you're able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.
SERGEY BRIN
lecture at UC Berkeley, October 5, 2005
Technology enables man to gain control over everything except technology.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
New York Times, July 8, 1983
In the twenty-first century the gizmos to be scared of are the ones that look like they don't do much.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The best technologies are those that are transparent, intimate and intuitive.
BRIAN COOLEY
"Is a Must-Attend Event Something You Must Attend?", Huffington Post, January 9, 2017
My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, showoffy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"My San Francisco Buzz", Salon, March 12, 2008
I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can't just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it's really in how the technology is used. What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we're going.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"An Interview with Dr. Alan Lightman: At the Intersection of the Sciences and Humanities", Aegis, spring 2006
The chief social function of technology is to create new possibilities for human activity.
WILLIAM LEISS
Under Technology's Thumb
This technology is hurting us, I say. I blame the microwave for most of our problems. Anything that gets that hot without fire, that's from the devil. You don't believe me, you put a hot pocket in there for three or four minutes, pop that thing in your mouth, if that's not hell, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what is.
ELLEN DEGENERES
Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now
Technology improves things so fast that by the time we can afford the best, there's something better.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Let me toss out the idea that, according to the logic of technoconsumerism, in which markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, and makes us feel all-powerful, and doesn't throw terrible scenes when it's replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
JONATHAN FRANZEN
Farther Away: Essays
There are periods when innovation reaches critical mass, when there is such a combination of new things, it often means that with new technology combined with new ideas, that the existing regulatory framework is left behind. And the role of the public sector is to come up with regulations that allow society the benefit of those innovations in the private sector while curtailing some of the abuses. The problem with the current situation, I believe, is that we had for too long a dominant ideological viewpoint that rejected that--which rejected the notion that innovation of a very, very substantial sort, innovation that just was turning around a whole lot of previous assumptions and that very much changed existing patterns, that that did not require new regulation.
BARNEY FRANK
speech, July 27, 2009
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
An Introduction to Mathematics
To many of us now, computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A. But as surely as America's pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century, the same pioneer spirit today is opening up on another vast front of opportunity, the frontier of high technology.
RONALD REAGAN
State of the Union Address, January 25, 1983
Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance