quotations about technology
All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
JERRY MANDER
attributed, Snap to Grid
The whole concept of smartphone addiction, or an unhealthy reliance on any technology, is unfair when applied indiscriminately to the population as a whole. It wreaks of luxury and entitlement and ignorance of the basic fact that smartphones are just a portal -- some people use that portal to obsessively check Twitter, sure, but others use it for basic necessities. I use my smartphone constantly not to get my fix, but to stay alive.
JAMISON HILL
"I'm not 'addicted' to my smartphone", Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2017
The power to hurt ... has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.
ROGER ZELAZNY
He Who Shapes
You know what your trouble is?... You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Burning Chrome
As technology gives us unprecedented access to our memories, might we yearn for the good old days when we forgot things?
BEN ROWEN
"The End of Forgetting", The Atlantic, June 2017
Technology is only as good as the people creating it.
CLINT BORGEN
Israeli Tribune, 2014
We now stand in the vestibule of a vast new technological age--one that, despite its capacity for human destruction, has an equal capacity to make poverty and human misery obsolete. If our efforts are wisely directed--and if our unremitting efforts for dependable peace begin to attain some success--we can surely become participants in creating an age characterized by justice and rising levels of human well-being.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
State of the Union Address, January 7, 1960
There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Gather at the River", Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
The whole promise of technology is this: If you want it, you got it. But what if waiting is an essential part of the goodness of the world?
JEN POLLOCK MICHEL
"How to Binge Watch Like a Believer", Christianity Today, April 17, 2017
Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don't have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It's all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
JONATHAN FRANZEN
Farther Away: Essays
What is technology?... It's another god.
NORA ROBERTS
Morrigan's Cross
Technology, though ceaselessly striving toward the future, has continually revised how we view the past.
BEN ROWEN
"The End of Forgetting", The Atlantic, June 2017
Technology can do little for people who have nothing to say.
ERIC AUCHARD
"Blog Publishers Stealing Web Limelight", Reuters, March 1, 2003
Technology is mostly used as a force for good, but its adverse consequences are also spreading at the same time. The consequences are spreading faster and cutting deeper than ever before. Threats to security, privacy, fake news and social media that becomes anti-social. Sometimes the very tech that's meant to connect us, divides us.
TIM COOK
commencement speech at MIT, June 9, 2017
We're merging with these nonbiological technologies. We're already on that path. I mean, this little Android phone I'm carrying on my belt is not yet inside my physical body, but that's an arbitrary distinction. It is part of who I am.
RAY KURZWEIL
"Reinvent Yourself", Playboy, April 19, 2016
The question, then: Is this a future we want? After all, look at what the Internet was as a shining example of the power of technology to change our lives and what it has become in the years and decades since.
KIRK BAIRD
"How technology is changing our art, our world -- and even ourselves", Toledo Blade, May 21, 2017
The best technologies are the ones that weave themselves into daily life and are not noticeable.
MICHAEL SABBAGH
"Sabbagh Sets Out SES Vision", Satellite Today, May 17, 2017
Technology makes forming groups cheaper and easier than it's ever been. Forming and coordinating groups is the hard problem of the human condition; the reason we have religions and corporations and criminal undergrounds and political parties. Doing work together means doing more than one person could do on their own.
CORY DOCTOROW
"Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this", The Guardian, May 31, 2017
As technology pervades, spying becomes cheaper and inequality becomes more stable -- but not infinitely stable. With enough inequality over enough time, the cherished idiocies of the ruling elites will eventually cause a collapse. All technology does is delay it, which is terrible news, since the longer a foolish policy is in place, the more of a policy-debt we incur, and the worse the payback will be: lost generations, rising seas, etc.
CORY DOCTOROW
"Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this", The Guardian, May 31, 2017
As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
DON DELILLO
interview, The Paris Review, fall 1993