“The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.”

— Freeman Dyson , book Infinite in All Directions

Source: Infinite in All Directions (1988), Ch. 8 : Quick Is Beautiful, p. 135
Context: 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.

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Freeman Dyson 90

theoretical physicist and mathematician 1923

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
Context: Technological competition ignites total war, which means it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity... What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school.

“An isolated human in a simple society is usually a dead human…”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

“This deficiency in our ideas is not, indeed, perceived in common life, nor are we sensible, that in the most usual conjunctions of cause and effect we are as ignorant of the ultimate principle, which binds them together, as in the most unusual and extraordinary.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 7
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding
Context: This deficiency in our ideas is not, indeed, perceived in common life, nor are we sensible, that in the most usual conjunctions of cause and effect we are as ignorant of the ultimate principle, which binds them together, as in the most unusual and extraordinary. But this proceeds merely from an illusion of the imagination; and the question is, how far we ought to yield to these illusions. This question is very difficult, and reduces us to a very dangerous dilemma, whichever way we answer it. For if we assent to every trivial suggestion of the fancy; beside that these suggestions are often contrary to each other; they lead us into such errors, absurdities, and obscurities, that we must at last become asham'd of our credulity. Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compar'd to those angels, whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings. This has already appear'd in so many instances, that we may spare ourselves the trouble of enlarging upon it any farther.

“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Ch. II
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

“We're like a really nice drink. We help people get through the day--we make life a little sunnier. I don't think we have any profound effect. If anybody has had a profound effect, it's The Beatles, and their effect is still minimal. There are things in the world way more important than music. Family is 50 times more important than music.”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

Corgan, William. Interview. Playboy. (Month?), 1997.

“From one point of view, structure is a part of technology; for example the spread of the bureaucratic form of organization might be said to be the most profound technological innovation in the last 3 or 4 centuries.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "Hospitals: technology, structure and goals", 1965, p. 914

“My own feeling was that witnessing the explosion of an atomic bomb, and having to examine all the dead animals, had a profound effect on my father.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 12
Achieving The Impossible (2010)

“All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Not Dead Yet" (1999).
2000s, 2000, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000)

“The most human thing about us is our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Man and the future of organizations, Volume 5, School of Business Administration, Georgia State University, 1974, p. 19
1970s

“Agriculture is the oldest and most vicious of humanity’s bio-technologies.”

Bruce Sterling book Islands in the Net

Source: Islands in the Net (1988), Chapter 11 (p. 389)

“The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.”

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