Quotes about technology

Someone must have known, but I never did. I have often wondered. It was the only way, you see, that a war could still be fought. No human could go to fight that kind of war. So man’s servants and companions, the machines, carried on the war. I don’t know why they kept on fighting. I have often asked myself. They’d destroyed all there’d ever been to fight for and there was not use of keeping on.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool — technological brother to the hoe, the wrench, the hammer — and yet as far a cry from these as the human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There'd never be an end, he thought — no end to anything.

What is a bow and arrow?

It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war.

It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering.

It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.

It is a symbol of a way of life.

From the development of the textile loom two centuries ago to today's Internet, output per hour has increased fifty fold.

Technology is potential freedom from brutality.

Machine-devoured, all his hours were given o’er to that insidious circuitry, and old grew he, unnoticing, in the service of his engines.

This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.

Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not numbers but know-how; this situation was apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity — "property" — confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.

The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.