“Technology does not always equal progress.”

Life After God (1994)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Technology does not always equal progress." by Douglas Coupland?
Douglas Coupland photo
Douglas Coupland 193
Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and grap… 1961

Related quotes

Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Barack Obama photo

“Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan at Hiroshima Peace Memorial at Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, Japan (May 27, 2016) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/05/27/remarks-president-obama-and-prime-minister-abe-japan-hiroshima-peace
2016
Context: There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction. [... ] Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds; to cure disease and understand the cosmos. But those same discoveries can be turned into ever-more efficient killing machines. The wars of the modern age teach this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well.

Viktor Schauberger photo

“In every case do the opposite to whatever technology does today. Then you will always be on the right track.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 36, p. 3 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Albert Einstein photo

“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Jane Roberts photo
Vernor Vinge photo

“The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.”

Vernor Vinge (1944) American mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction writer

The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)

Lewis M. Branscomb photo

“Science has been the absolute bedrock of technological and economic progress in the United States.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Branscomb (2012) in: " Scientist Lewis M. Branscomb Gives $1 Million Gift to Found New Center for Science and Democracy at UCS http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/scientist-lewis-branscomb-center-science-democracy-ucs-1385.html" at ucsusa.org/news, April 30, 2012

Buckminster Fuller photo

“What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

Earth, Inc. (1973) In this passage, Fuller begins to explain why technological progress seems to make great gains in war time and states his view that this is a reflection of advances mainly made in peacetime — wars simply force nations to take notice of their advances in the pure science and then they apply those advances to the war effort. Later in the book Fuller will explain why he thinks war is not necessary to bring advances in the pure sciences into actual production. He uses this to advance the notion that humans can very comfortably live at a high standard of living by "doing more with less."
1970s
Context: It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as "matter," find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science. (1947)

Zafar Mirzo photo

Related topics