TECHNOLOGY QUOTES
quotations about technology
The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The Power of Myth
Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock
Can you avoid knowledge? You cannot! Can you avoid technology? You cannot! Things are going to go ahead in spite of ethics, in spite of your personal beliefs, in spite of everything.
JOSE M. R. DELGADO
Scientific American, October 2005
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
R2-D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer.
C-3PO
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth it for end users, however much fun it is for nerds.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
Every generation's breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation's technology.
DAN BROWN
The Lost Symbol
That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Spook Country
Technology should have freed mankind from the burdens of life. Instead, it created new ones.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes--a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts; a world of resistance--with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
JONATHAN FRANZEN
Farther Away: Essays
I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance ... and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance ... to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.
ISAAC ASIMOV
lecture at Newark College of Engineering, November 8, 1974
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to H. Zangger, 1917
The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.
DAVID HOCKNEY
Observer, July 10, 1994
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Profiles of the Future
Technology ... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
C. P. SNOW
attributed, New York Times, March 15, 1971
Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Sceptical Essays
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
attributed, Quote Unquote
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
ARCHIBALD PUTT
Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat