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Technology: No Place for Wimps!
-Scott Adams
Dilbert
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People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.
-J. G. Ballard
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As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association and affection.
-Wendell Berry
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Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue. Anthropological Commentary The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true.
-Neils Bohr
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Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of Information can drive our Knowledge.
on computarization of libraries
-Daniel J. Boorstin, "New York Times", July 8, 1983
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Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
-Omar Bradley
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Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-Stewart Brand
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We've been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves.
We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God.
-John Brunner
Judas 1967
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Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
-Thomas Carlyle
History of the French Revolution, 1837
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When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Arthur C. Clarke
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Tame your technology
-Lee J. Colan
107 Ways to Stick to It
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We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.
-Edward Dahlberg
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This means we must subject the machine technology to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money. The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine the servant of man. That is the revolution that is coming. That revolution now that the people hold the residual powers of government need not be a repetition of 1776. It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal.
-William O. Douglas
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Everything that can be invented, has been invented.
-Charles H. Duell, 1899
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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.
-Freeman Dyson
Infinite in All Directions, Harper and Row, New York, 1988, p 135
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Technological progress is like an ax in the hands of a pathological criminal.
-Albert Einstein
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The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
-Albert Einstein
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard Feynman
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Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
-Max Frisch
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The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Technology is very seductive, and it is certainly changing the way things are designed and made and taught. The problem is when technology has seduced you away from thinking about things as deeply as you should.
-Arthur Ganson
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For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.
-Neil Gershenfeld
When Things Start to Think, 1999
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If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.
-Michael Harrington
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Books about Technology
