Quotes About Technology

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.

Technology isn't a villain. Technology should help, but if you just use the technology for the sake of technology, then you're cheating your audience. You're not giving them the best story and the best direction and so forth.

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.

Whenever a new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response - that is, high touch - or the technology is rejected... We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.

The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react. In the last 20 years, US industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology, but has realised little improvement in the efficiency of its knowledge workers ­ and virtually none in their effectiveness. If we could solve the problems of the assimilation of new technology, the potential would be enormous.

You can't just stop technological progress. Even if one country stops researching artificial intelligence, some other countries will continue to do it. The real question is what to do with the technology. You can use exactly the same technology for very different social and political purposes. So I think people shouldn't be focused on the question of how to stop technological progress because this is impossible. Instead the question should be what kind of usage to make of the new technology. And here we still have quite a lot of power to influence the direction it's taking.

If we're not able to launch our own people and operate our own spacecraft anymore then, you know, space - whether it should be or not, it's seen as like a harbinger of technology. If you can fly people into space, if you can operate into space, then you've got high technology and if you're the leader of that, then you're the leader in technology. If we lose that on a more or less permanent basis, or for a long period of time, my fear is that it will creep into the national psyche in all areas and we as a nation as a whole will kind of be diminished.

Technology is driving the innovation. Technology is driving the creativity. Technology and the use of that is going to determine our workers' ability to compete in the 21st century global marketplace.

Contemporary technology could be used to eliminate ownership and management of corporations. It could be used to provide - lets say Apple computers. In principle information technology could be used to provide direct information to the work force on the ground so that they could democratically decide what the company would do, eliminating the role of management. It could be used for that. People aren't developing technology for that purpose.

I was always interested in technology. When personal computers came out, I was one of the first to pick one up and begin playing with it. My hobbies tend to be not about going fishing or hiking, but about playing on machines. Just like some people like helicopters and tanks and cars, I like technology a lot.

Technology isn't fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.

By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.

Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive. We're especially drawn to the power. Many of the images of technology are about making us more powerful, extending what we can do. Unfortunately, 95 percent of this is hype, because I think we're powerful without it.

The technology can help the artist work in a different way and the artist also helps define what the technology should be. They call for the tools that they want to be able to tell their story. I thought that was really exciting and interesting.

What works on the net works for people in general. The net has very little to do with technology, what matters is how people use the technology.

If you look at the banking business over many years, it's always been a huge user of technology. This has been going on my whole life, that people have been adding technology, digitizing services.

To me, fear of the future means fear of technology. I have a little bit of that. I still use it, but I kind of see technology as this harmful thing that's so ingrained in my life that it sort of dictates and controls my relationship with it.

Technology is run by sex, because it's very important to people, both technology and sex.

The solution was eventually found by Johannes Gutenberg, who made the breakthrough that finally established printing as the communication technology of the future. Similar ideas may have been under development around the same time in Prague and Haarlem. But in business, the key question is not about who else is in the race, it's about who gets there first. Johannes Gutenberg was the first to make the new technology work, ensuring his place in any history of the human race.

Disco is the first technology music. And what I mean is that 'disco' music is named after discs, because when technology grew to where they didn't need a band in the clubs, the DJ played it on a disc.

What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.

Technology is incredibly powerful. And in many ways, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can actually accomplish with the right science and the right technology.

I've been working in computer animation for 25 years. I'm obviously a devotee of the technology. I just think it's the one aspect of the medium that's going to continue to revolutionize the filmmaking. It's constantly changing and it's constantly opening up new possibilities. The technology is evolving where 2-D animation was ultimately limited by how long you could pay how many people to make a movie. I mean computers, not that it's in anyway a labor saving device, but it promises to open up exciting new technical possibilites.

Technology transforms people's lives. From mitigating poverty to simplifying processes, ending corruption to providing better services, Technology is omnipresent. It has become the single-most important instrument of human progress.

There are a lot of designers who think they understand technology and a lot of technology guys who think they understand design. But to put them together and make it robust and repeatable for the mass market? It's an art.

We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

The personal computer was a disruptive innovation relative to the mainframe because it enabled even a poor fool like me to have a computer and use it, and it was enabled by the development of the micro processor. The micro processor made it so simple to design and build a computer that IB could throw in together in a garage. And so, you have that simplifying technology as a part of every disruptive innovation. It then becomes an innovation when the technology is embedded in a different business model that can take the simplified solution to the market in a cost-effective way.

It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

You know, the technology was at the right place for us to build this world. The most difficult thing about doing The Croods was no doubt the building of the world. Every single thing in this film is organic. Organic things are tough. Very very labour intensive. And we have no man-made structures. You could argue that everything in this film is really an exterior. Even the interiors of the cave are exteriors. So building this world was the biggest thing of all, and the technology was there to do it.

We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.

Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society, you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast, and the impact of the change on society and technology is global, not local.

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.

I wanted to feel good about the way I looked. I didn't understand why style had to be sacrificed for sports technology. I found when going to the gym women were wearing their own tees, without the technology. I started to think, does it make you run faster if you wear that terrible color or sweat less if you wear that horrible fabric? And I challenged it, and the answers were not there to why we were being given poor design work. It was something I wanted to bring to women's wardrobes.

History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.

Advances in technology have opened up possibilities in the cultural realm throughout history. I'm intrigued by developments in technology - as an artist it gives me a new palette to explore.

I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology.

Not only I would like to work as the youngest technology evangelist at Microsoft, I would like to work on those cutting-edge technologies which would be explored by technology evangelists five years from now.

I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying.

From phones to cars to medicine, technology touches every part of our lives. If you can create technology, you can change the world.

Huge advances in clean energy technology are happening all the time. Solar and wind are booming. New ways to generate energy from our windows, the paint on our walls, and even our bike paths are being invented all the time. Technology is moving forward, but it needs to be moving forward faster.

...heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results - largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business...Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.

Technology shapes society and society shapes technology.

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out - it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by.

There's this progress, incredible progress of technology, everything is figured out, everything is known, everything is systematic and under control, communication is going on, but still there is such a great portion of life that we have utterly no control over. It's completely chaotic. Something could happen overnight.

If you view computer designers as artists, they're really into more of an art form that can be mass-produced, like records, or like prints, than they are into fine arts. They want something where they can express themselves to a large number of people through their medium, and their medium is technology and manufacturing.

I'm looking for the surprises, you know, and the unexpected moments of technology, the unexpected moments of musical creation.