Quotes about technology
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Gerhard Richter photo

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5
1960's

Mitt Romney photo

“Liquefied coal, gosh. Hitler during the Second World War — I guess because he was concerned about losing his oil — liquefied coal. That technology is still there.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

[2007-04-20, Romney's Energy Gaffe, Ryan Sager, The New York Sun, http://www.nysun.com/national/romneys-energy-gaffe/52883/]
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President

Manuel Castells photo

“Internet use is diffusing fast, but this diffusion follows a spatial pattern that fragments its geography according to wealth, technology, and power: it is the new geography of development.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 8, The Geography of the Internet, p. 212

David Cameron photo
Gleb Pavlovsky photo

“Power in Russia today is the power that's established, mounted. It arises anew and it's authoritarian in its technology, but not in its program. It doesn't know which one it wants to be and can be — this depends on its future programming by people, i. e. you.”

Gleb Pavlovsky (1951) Russian political scientist

"Сегодня власть в России — власть устанавливаемая, учредительная власть. Она возникает заново и авторитарна по технологии, но не по своей программе. Она еще не знает, какой хочет и может быть, — это зависит от будущего ее программирования людьми, то есть вами."

Don Tapscott photo
Frank W. Abagnale photo

“What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.”

Frank W. Abagnale (1948) American security consultant, former confidence trickster, check forger, impostor, and escape artist

Frank Abagnale on how easy it is with modern technology to commit fraud
Frank Abagnale Jr. - Biography http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0007646/bio, Internet Movie Database, accessed 2008-10-12

“The art of the creative leader is the art of institution building, the reworking of human and technological materials to fashion an organism that embodies new and enduring values.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 152-3

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh photo

“In this century, technology will concentrate on the brain, whose heavenly potential, is yet to be realized.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

April 1, 2001, First Arab Conference on Arabizing the Internet, Amman, Jordan.

“At the heart of the matter… our technologies have become more powerful than our theories… We can do with technology what we cannot do with science.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Source: Complexity and Postmodernism (1998), p. 1-2; as cited by David Byrne (1999) in: " Complexity and Postmodernism: Book Review http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/2/2/review1.html" in JASSS Vol 2 (2)

Mary Parker Follett photo

“The study of human relations in business and the study of the technology of operating are bound up together.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

Attributed to Mary Parker Follett in: Business: The Ultimate Resource, 2001. p. 904.
Attributed from postum publications

Theodore Kaczynski photo
David Brin photo

“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

Marshall McLuhan photo

“Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.”

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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 171

Kent Hovind photo
Oscar Niemeyer photo
Tom McCarthy (writer) photo

“The Phantom Menace is not a masterpiece, but it's an example of how imagination, craftsmanship, and technological bravura can fashion superior entertainment out of something that is far from flawless.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/sw99.html of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).
Three-and-a-half star reviews

Ray Kurzweil photo

“We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

V. P. Singh photo
Zakir Hussain (politician) photo
Philippe Kahn photo
W. Brian Arthur photo
Marshall McLuhan photo
Tami Stronach photo
Ayn Rand photo
John Horgan (journalist) photo
Tjalling Koopmans photo
Ervin László photo

“[ Technology is] the instrumentality for accessing and using free energies in human societies for human and social purposes.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: pp.237-249; As cited in: K.L. Dennis (2003, p. 36).

Regina E. Dugan photo

“The DARPA model has three elements:
Ambitious goals. The agency’s projects are designed to harness science and engineering advances to solve real-world problems or create new opportunities. At Defense, GPS was an example of the former and stealth technology of the latter. The problems must be sufficiently challenging that they cannot be solved without pushing or catalyzing the science. The presence of an urgent need for an application creates focus and inspires greater genius.
Temporary project teams. DARPA brings together world-class experts from industry and academia to work on projects of relatively short duration. Team members are organized and led by fixed-term technical managers, who themselves are accomplished in their fields and possess exceptional leadership skills. These projects are not open-ended research programs. Their intensity, sharp focus, and finite time frame make them attractive to the highest-caliber talent, and the nature of the challenge inspires unusual levels of collaboration. In other words, the projects get great people to tackle great problems with other great people.
Independence. By charter, DARPA has autonomy in selecting and running projects. Such independence allows the organization to move fast and take bold risks and helps it persuade the best and brightest to join.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

“Special Forces” Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems (2013)

Manuel Castells photo
Manuel Castells photo
George W. Bush photo
Donald A. Norman photo
Sushma Swaraj photo
Wanda Orlikowski photo
Joel Mokyr photo

“Technological systems, like all cultural systems, must have some built-in stability.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 327

George W. Bush photo
W. Brian Arthur photo

“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. (2009), p. 10

Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
Marissa Mayer photo

“You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.”

Marissa Mayer (1975) American business executive and engineer, former ceo of Yahoo!

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234222.

C.K. Prahalad photo

“BoP consumer problems cannot be solved with old technologies.”

Source: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, 2009, p. 26

Steve Jobs photo

“digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud
- PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …
- Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator's dilemma)
- Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven't quite figured it out yet
- tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

email sent to his managers staff in 2010, which went public during trial against Samsung http://fr.scribd.com/doc/216405190/Apple-outline?_ga=1.21582200.27979217.1396947917
2010s

George W. Bush photo
Václav Havel photo
Vincent Massey photo

“Technology has been defined, perhaps a little ungenerously, as "a long Greek name for a bag of tools."”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, December 6, 1955
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Manuel Castells photo
Jared Diamond photo
Nelson Mandela photo
Arthur F. Burns photo
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh photo
Richard Stallman photo

“While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance in technology is an opening for them to further restrict its users.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

Stallman's Law (2012) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallmans-law.html
2010s
Variant: While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.

Michael Dell photo

“We have a long history here of integrating the technologies closer together. This is what customers have been asking us to do. It is what we are doing. It is working extremely well. There is much, much more to come here.”

Michael Dell (1965) Businessman, CEO

CRN: "Michael Dell: 'Much, Much More To Come' On Dell EMC VMware Integration" https://www.crn.com/news/data-center/300104941/michael-dell-much-much-more-to-come-on-dell-emc-vmware-integration.htm (11 June 2018)

Simon Kuznets photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Jack Valenti photo

“Companies are in the midst of a revolutionary transformation. Industrial age competition is shifting to information age competition. During the industrial age, from 1850 to about 1975, companies succeeded by how well they could capture the benefits from economies of scale and scope. Technology mattered, but, ultimately, success accrued to companies that could embed the new technology into physical assets that offered efficient, mass production of standard products.
During the industrial age, financial control systems were developed in companies, such as General Motors, DuPont, Matsushita, and General Electric, to facilitate and monitor efficient allocations of financial and physical capital. A summary financial measure such as return-on-capital employed (ROCE) could both direct a company’s internal capital to its most productive use and monitor the efficiency by which operating divisions used financial and physical capital to create value for shareholders.
The emergence of the information era, however, in the last decades of the twentieth century, made obsolete many of the fundamental assumptions of industrial age competition. No longer could companies gain sustainable competitive advantage by merely deploying new technology into physical assets rapidly, and by excellent management of financial assets and liabilities.”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2-3

Rollo May photo
Kent Hovind photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Charles Erwin Wilson photo
Noam Cohen photo

“An engineering degree is also no longer a requisite to using technology, as seemingly anyone today can install a printer or upload a video. Similarly, another signifier of nerd status — knowing obscure facts about favorite subjects — has also lost its currency.”

Noam Cohen (1999) American journalist

Noam, Cohen, The New York Times, We're All Nerds Now, September 13, 2014, October 29, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/sunday-review/were-all-nerds-now.html,

C. N. R. Rao photo
Robert Oppenheimer photo
Daniel Suarez photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.”

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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 71

Richard Leakey photo

“General Systems Theory, as originally intended by Von Bertalanffy, is an ideal framework for the modeling of a business enterprise. Work, in its most civilized form should enrich, empower and emancipate. Thus we must continue to find ways to support work as a humanistic, not mechanistic endeavor. We must continue to seek out new models of business that support and enhance the individual as well as the collective whole. Given all this new technology, we need new institutions for handling it.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Beer (1974) Designing Freedom. House Of Anansi Press, Toronto cited in: B. Dawson (2007) "Bertalanffy Revisited: Operationalizing A General Systems Theory Based Business Model Through General Systems Thinking, Modeling, And Practice", In: Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the ISSS, 2007.

Ismail Serageldin photo

“I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like scissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for information. And there what you want to do is how to get the information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality, to use digital sources rather than the published sources for references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they come out the information in them is obsolete. Second, you have to search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index and come back whereas you can type to search in. […] But if you want to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnets of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves … I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that Wikipedia pioneered.”

Ismail Serageldin (1944) egyptian academic

Wikimania 2008 press conference 0'33 (August 2008).

“The rise of the welfare state, on the one hand, and of the military bureaucracy, on the other, are instances of the manner in which technology is enforcing a socialization of life.”

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) American historian and economist

Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter IV, Part 1, A Recapitulation, p. 177

Kent Hovind photo
Reggie Fils-Aimé photo
Wanda Orlikowski photo
Andrew S. Grove photo

“Technology happens, it's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

Time, TIME: Man Of The Year, Walter, Isaacson, 1997-12-29 http://www.time.com/time/special/moy/grove/opener1.html,
1980s - 1990s

Steven M. Greer photo

“They may be a quarter million years more advanced than we are technologically. Their technology will look like magic to us. I don't think that we should be running around thinking these are gods in flying saucers that we should worship. We need to take this in a very rational way.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Source: Quoted in: Researcher's Close Encounters Convince Him Of Extraterrestrials The Virginian-Pilot, Roy A. Bahls, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=VP&p_theme=vp&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EAFF84CB5EACDC1&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM (22 March 1995)

Leonid Brezhnev photo
Fritz Todt photo