Quotes about technology (1361 quotes, page 6)

“It is possible to regulate watercourses over any given distance without embankment works; to transport timber and other materials, even when heavier than water, for example ore, stones, etc., down the centre of such water-courses; to raise the height of the water table in the surrounding countryside and to endow the water with all those elements necessary for the prevailing vegetation. Furthermore it is possible in this way to render timber and other such materials non-inflammable and rot resistant; to produce drinking and spa-water for man, beast and soil of any desired composition and performance artificially, but in the way that it occurs in Nature; to raise water in a vertical pipe without pumping devices; to produce any amount of electricity and radiant energy almost without cost; to raise soil quality and to heal cancer, tuberculosis and a variety of nervous disorders… the practical implementation of this … would without doubt signify a complete reorientation in all areas of science and technology. By application of these new found laws, I have already constructed fairly large installations in the spheres of log-rafting and river regulation, which as is known, have functioned faultlessly for a decade, and which today still present insoluble enigmas to the various scientific disciplines concerned.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Law , Way , Drink , Nature

“Strict ethical guidelines need to be developed in anticipation of significant technological and biotechnological advances in order to guarantee human dignity.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.29

“What underclass? I mean you know, what underclass? Do you know any of them? Do they have automobiles? Most of them probably do. Do most of them have television sets? Do most of them have telephones? Well, if they can afford automobiles, they can afford computers. And since they have television sets, they already have access to communications technology. And since they have telephones, they can talk to one another. Wherein are they deprived?”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)

Communication

“Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.”

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

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 85

Nature

“V has come to be my last Metal Gear.
It has been an honor and a joy to have been given the opportunity to work on Metal Gear for nearly twenty amazing years.
Tоday's computer graphics, technology, and hardware—compared to those of twenty years ago—have evolved so significantly. As a result, the art that can be created has dramatically changed.
However, the process of conceptualizing and creating a character by understanding their personality, their habits, their backstory, and the role they play—this has fundamentally remained the same. Refining ideas and doing countless sketches over and over are tasks that at times feel formidable and complex. At the same time, they are very fun and gratifying.”

Yoji Shinkawa (1971) Japanese illustrator

Foreword to The Art of Metal Gear Solid V, Dark Horse Comics, 2016, p. 7 https://books.google.it/books?id=BerxDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA7.

Art , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“Rolling Stone: It's been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –
Jobs: The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.”

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

1990s

Money , People , World , Idea

“Every technology goes through three stages: first a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct understanding of natural laws and proper design therefrom.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Rolling Stones

Source: The Rolling Stones (1952), Chapter 4, “Aspects of Domestic Engineering” (pp. 52-53)

“Mankind in the technological world is prepared to give up his independence in exchange for all kinds of facilities and in exchange for consumer products and a certain security. In short, in exchange for a package of welfare provisions offered to him by society. As I was thinking about that I couldn't help recalling the story in the Bible about Esau and the lentil broth. Esau, who is hungry, is prepared to give up the blessings and promise of God in exchange for some lentil broth. In the same way, modern people are prepared to give up their independence in exchange for some technological lentils.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

The Betrayal by Technology (1993 film)

God , People , World , Way

“Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again. […] As each new technology matures, customers are no longer happy with the flashy promises of the technology but instead demand understandable and workable designs. Slowly the manufacturers relearn the same basic principles and apply them to their products. The most egregious failures always come from the developers of the most recent technologies.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, p. xv.
The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002)

Error , Failure , Understanding , Problem

“My dear friends! We move everything back to front. What we are doing is wrong and contrary to Nature. Nature moves in other ways. She primarily employs drawing, i. e. sucking energies, since these are indispensable to Nature for the growth and maintenance of life. Nature uses pressure energies and explosive forces only for reducing quality and destruction. Atomic physicists also work upside down. They would be more correct if they started with simple nuclear fusion. They should set about the cold transformation of hydrogen into helium, as Nature has done over the millions of years of Creation. Today's technology has a tiger by the tail, because it splits the heaviest atoms with the greatest development of heat and an enormous expenditure of energy.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Alick Bartholomew: The Schauberger Keys

Life , Way , Nature , Drawing

“We are not to call for tyranny and bans on freedom. It is obvious that we cannot stop publication of what we view as indecent in our sacred faith…failing to make use of Western freedom of press and other technologies to show the West the values of Islam is intellectual failure and a guilt that should not be linked to Islam.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2000s, Burning embassies is not the way (2008)

Faith , Failure , Freedom

“Advances in technology won’t be as significant as they have been in the past, most games won’t be materially improved by simulating every drop of water in the pond you are wading through. More resources can be profitably spent to make the creation process easier. How things will play out with respect to connectivity and where the data resides and processing takes place is still a very interesting question. The overlap and convergence between desktop computers, consoles, laptops, handheld gaming devices, and cell phones is also interesting. It is all still quite exciting.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in Brad Cook, "John Carmack: Making the Magic Happen" http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2009/02/johncarmack/ Apple.com

Game , Question , Water , Past

“Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002

Law

“Historically speaking, the first wave of the punk/new wave (approximately 1976-1983) was primarily a movement of creative abuse of hardly-ever-used consumer media technology. Parents (usually technophile Baby boomer dads) bought expensive equipment like 8-track recorders, Super-8 and Polaroid cameras and later VHS camcorders and only used it to "document" birthday parties and other eminently boring ceremonies. But the rebellious teens found interesting new things to do with the dust-collecting media tech, and it started one of the biggest DIY revolutions of the 20th century. So punk (years before cyperpunk) was a movement of youngsters goofing around with (aka appropriating) consumer tech.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Mental Floss http://mentalfloss.com/article/79393/traceroute-documentary-about-nerds-and-annihilation

Birthday , Parent , Baby

“Democracy is spreading across the world. Democracy is only possible with easy access to information and good communications. And technology is a way of facilitating communications.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)

World , Way , Democracy , Communication

“Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure—particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology—is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized.”

Mark Slouka (1958) author

Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness

Money , School , Understanding , Thinking

“In 1995 we started our study of enterprise architecture – we just did not know it. At the time we thought we were studying information technology infrastructure transformations. In 1998 we thought we were studying enterprise system implementations. In 2000 it was e-business. But sometime in 2000, we recognized that each of these studies examined basically the same thing: Enterprise Architecture.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Source: Enterprise architecture as strategy, 2006, p. vii

Business , Study , Time

“Our exploration of emergent social structures across domains of human activity and experience leads to an over-arching conclusion: as an historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure.”

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

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 500

Age , Time

“Organizations under norms of rationality seek to place their boundaries around those activities which if left to the task environment would be crucial contingencies.
The implication of this proposition is that we should expect to find organizations including within their domains activities or competencies which, on a technological basis, could be performed by the task environment without damage to the to the major mission of the organization. For the hotel, for example, provision of rooms and meals would be the major mission, and the operation of a laundry would be excluded; yet we find hotels operating laundries. On the other hand, provision of rooms and meals would not be within the major mission of the hospital, although hospitals commonly include these activities within their domains.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Organizations in Action, 1967

“The Internet is powerful because it allows people to organise around issues at unprecedented speed, broadcast their thoughts and challenge those in charge. A wave of such groups banded together in early 2011 to demand the removal of authoritarian leaders in the Middle East as one country after another rose up with varying degrees of success. But the Internet doesn't cause revolution. It is a communications network. What people choose to do with technology - that is where we can make moral judgements. Some people will use it for ill, others for good. Security forces tend to focus on the ills, while the majority use it for good. In the name of protecting us from 'bad things on the Internet' there are increasing moves to suppress communications networks in both repressive and democratic countries. Demands to shut down, censor, filter or in other ways oversee and control the way people communicate are on the rise.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page xi.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

People , Way , Communication , Success

“In brief, on net balance, machines, technological improvements, economies and efficiency do not throw men out of work.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Curse of Machinery (ch. 7)

Men

“I know many people who like watching commercials because they're so funny. They provide relaxation and diversion. People come home after a day's work, from which they derive little satisfaction, and feel the need for diversion and amusement. The word diversion itself is already very significant. When Pascal uses the word diversion he means that people who follow the path of God deviate from the path which leads them to God as a result of diversion and amusement. Instead of thinking of God, they amuse themselves. So, instead of thinking about the problems which have been created by technology and our work we want to amuse ourselves.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

The Betrayal by Technology (1993 film)

God , People , Feeling , Home

“The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life work, family, technology, the primacy of the car and the single-family house — is foreign to the mainstream media that define our common sense. And so conflicts that cannot be addressed politically have expressed themselves by other means. From public psychodramas like the O. J. Simpson trial, the Lewinsky scandal and Columbine to disaster movies, talk shows and "reality TV," popular culture carries the burden of our emotions about race, feminism, sexual morality, youth culture, wealth, competition, exclusion, a physical and social environment that feels out of control.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Dreaming of War," The Nation (15 October 2001)

Life , Youth , Family , Cars

“…a few years back, in the 1980s, in our efforts to bring peace and democracy to the world we assisted the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and in our infinite wisdom we gave money, technology and training to Bin Laden, and now, this very year, we have declared that Bin Laden was responsible for the bombing in Africa. So what is our response, because we allow our President to pursue war too easily? What was the President's response? Some even say that it might have been for other reasons than for national security reasons. So he goes off and bombs Afghanistan, and he goes off and bombs Sudan, and now the record shows that very likely the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was precisely that, a pharmaceutical plant… As my colleagues know, at the end of this bill I think we get a hint as to why we do not go to Rwanda for humanitarian reasons… I think it has something to do with money, and I think it has something to do with oil… they are asking to set up and check into the funds that Saddam Hussein owes to the west. Who is owed? They do not owe me any money. But I will bet my colleagues there is a lot of banks in New York who are owed a lot of money, and this is one of the goals…
Dana Rohrabacher: This resolution is exactly the right formula… Support democracy. Oppose tyranny. Oppose aggression and repression… We should strengthen the victims so they can defend themselves. These things are totally consistent with America's philosophy, and it is a pragmatic approach as well… Our support for the Mujahedin collapsed the Soviet Union. Yes, there was a price to pay, because after the Soviet Union collapsed, we walked away, and we did not support those elements in the Mujahedin who were somewhat in favor of the freedom and western values. With those people who oppose this effort of pro democracy foreign policy, a pro freedom foreign policy rather than isolation foreign policy, they would have had us stay out of that war in Afghanistan. They would never have had us confronting Soviet aggression in different parts of the world… Mr. Speaker, the gentleman does not think it is proper for us to offer those people who are struggling for freedoms in Iraq against their dictatorship a helping hand?
Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I think it would be absolutely proper to do that, as long as it came out of the gentleman's wallet and we did not extract it from somebody in this country, a taxpayer at the point of a gun and say, look, bin Laden is a great guy. I want more of your money. That is what we did in the 1980s. That is what the Congress did. They went to the taxpayers, they put a gun to their head, and said, you pay up, because we think bin Laden is a freedom fighter.
Dana Rohrabacher: Well, if the gentleman will further yield, it was just not handled correctly.
Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, again reclaiming my time, the policy is flawed. The policy is flawed.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Debate on the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, October 5, 1998 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec98/cr100598.htm
1990s

Wisdom , Money , War , People

“We are in rapid transition today to a new world which threatens to be dominated by technological advance. In that new World. (1) man will have learned so much about nature's store of energy and its release that he will have the ability to virtually destroy civilization; (2) production, communication and transportation will all be "automatic" --these operations of man's material world will have become so vast and complex that they will have to proceed with a minimum of participation by man, his muscles, brains and senses; and (3) man will conquer space.”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

Ramo, Simon. " A new technique of education http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1767/1/ramo.pdf." Engineering and science 21.1 (1957): 17-22.

World , Communication , Nature , Sense

“For many purposes of organizational analysis technology might not be an independent variable but a dependent one.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Charles Perrow (1967), in: Industrial Relations Research Association, Proceedings of the ... Annual Winter Meeting, Vol. 19 (1967), p. 163
1960s

Dependency

“I'm not saying the battle is won
But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun
Wrested technology's sword from the hands of the warlords
Ooh, the tide is turning
Ooh, the tide is turning.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

"The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid)", on Radio K.A.O.S. (1987)

Sun , Night

“Scientific advances can wreak havoc with social values. What appears to be advanced thinking at times turns out to be retrograde attempts at dehumanization. Advances in technology can be used to commoditize human beings. Genetic fetal testing, for example, can be used to screen against the "unfit."”

Daniel Alan Vallero (1953) American scientist

Source: D.A. Vallero (2007) "Biomedical Ethics for Engineers: Ethics and Decision Making in Biomedical and Biosystem Engineering" ISBN: 978-0-7506-8227-5.

Thinking , Appearance , Time

“This paper reports on a comparative case study of 13 industrial firms that implemented an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It compares firms based on their dialectic leaming process. All firms had to overcome knowledge barriers of two types: those associated with the configuration of the ERP package, and those associated with the assimilation of new work processes. We found that both strong core teams and carefully managed consulting relationships addressed configuration knowledge barriers. User training that included both technical and business processes, along with a phased implementation approach, helped firms to overcome assimilation knowledge barriers. However, all firms in this study experienced ongoing concerns with assimilation knowledge barriers, and we observed two different approaches to address them. In a piecemeal approach, firms concentrated on the technology first and deferred consideration of process changes. In a concerted approach, both the technology and process changes were undertaken together. Although most respondents clearly stated a preference for either piecemeal or concerted change, all firms engaged in practices that reflected a combination of these approaches.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Abstract, p. 17-18
Learning to implement enterprise systems (2002)

Business , Knowledge , Study , Strong

“The notion of a steady state has meant different things at different times in history. To the traditional or classical economist, the steady state takes the biophysical dimensions of the planet — including population and available resources — as given and adapts technology and tastes to these objective conditions.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

A steady-state economy, 2008

History , Time

“Unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

“Creating a system to protect industrial and intellectual property is a prerequisite for the transfer of technology and consequently the resurgence of national technologies.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

June 18, 2007, National Seminar on Industrial Property and Technology Transfer in Arab States, Amman, Jordan.

“It's been warmer than today's climate in the past, much warmer. It has been colder than this climate in the past, much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities…. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we’ve only had this supposedly evil earth killing CO2 belching technology a mere speck of that time? Because, many believe global warming is real and there are people in our political world who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them, so they say "let us handle it". To make that transition easier, they trot out this false premise, that we are totally responsible for natural occurrences in the long span of our planetary history.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

The adapability of man to his climate http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/04/07/the-adapability-of-man-to-his-climate/, wattsupwiththat.com, April 7, 2007.
2007

People , World , History , Nature

“Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of a company's operation model… The key to effective enterprise architecture is to identify the processes, data, technology, and customer interfaces that take the operating model from vision to reality.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Source: Enterprise architecture as strategy, 2006, p. 47

Business , Reality

“For the West, the enemy was not "socialism" but capitalism. How to tame and subdue the polar bear, how to take over the talent, the science, the technology, how to buy out the human capital, how to acquire the intellectual property rights?”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 16, The "Thirdworldization" of the Russian Federation, p. 240

Science

“I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

"Putting It Together" p. 8
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)

Women

“It makes sense to describe a core competence as a complex adaptive system, located in the lower regions of the I-Space between an ordered regime in which knowledge assets get frozen into technologies and a chaotic regime in which the stability necessary for effective organizational coordination and integration remains absent. Core competences, then, have their being in a region of the I-Space sandwiched between an excess of usable structure and a total lack of it. We hypothesize that the possession of a core competence is one measure of a firm’s ability to deal with complexity.”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

Source: Knowledge Assets, 1998, p. 205

Knowledge , Sense

“What is good about campaigning using modern technology particularly the internet is that it is something new and does not cost anything. We have maximized the use of the internet in our campaigns. This is to set a trend and to show what is currently in demand among our youngsters.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Tony Lopez, "The natural successor to President Arroyo?", BizNews Asia, 11-18 June 2007, p. 25, ISSN 1655-7263.
2007

“Technology and innovation must act as a means of just social change—to reduce social gaps and inequality, to ensure that every person on this planet has a chance to enjoy the fruits thereof, and to make the world a better place.”

Yoel Esteron (1954) Israeli journalist

Can technology trump Trumpism? http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4882175,00.html, Ynetnews (21-11-16)

World , Chance , Personality

“By technology is meant the actions that an individual performs upon an object, with or without the aid of tools or mechanical devices, in order to make some change in that object. The object, or 'raw material', may be a living being, human or otherwise, a symbol, or an Inanimate object. People are raw materials in people-changing or people-processing organizations; symbols are materials in banks, advertising agencies, and some research organizations; the interactions of people are raw materials to be manipulated by administrators in organizations; boards of directors, committees, and councils are usually Involved with the changing or processing of symbols and human interactions, and so on.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 195

People , Change

“Near-ubiquitous technological monitoring is a consequence of the decline of cohesive societies that has occurred alongside the rising demand for individual freedom.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

In the Puppet Theatre: An Iron Mountain and a Shifting Spectacle (p. 121)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Freedom

“I am simply pointing out that at the rate at which we are going the whole genetic engineering technology will end up in the hands of the political system to be used for the complete control and subjugation of man.”

U.G. Krishnamurti book Mind is a Myth

Source: Mind is a Myth (1987), Ch. 4: There Is Nothing To Understand

“Economists’ instincts are that uncertainty about current prices, future prices, and the real meaning of nominal trade-offs between the present and the future; distortions introduced by the failure of government finance to be inflation-neutral; windfall redistributions; and the focusing of attention not on preferences, factors of production, and technologies but on predicting the future evolution of nominal magnitudes must degrade the functioning of the price system and reduce the effectiveness of the market economy at providing consumer utility. The cumulative jump in the price level as a result of the inflation of the 1970s may have been very expensive to the United States in terms of the associated reduction in human welfare.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Ch. 6 : "America’s Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s" in Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy (1997) edited by Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

Failure , Future

“The increasing speed of technological advancement and economic integration in recent years has highlighted the importance of intellectual property and put great stress on the ability of established national and international systems that administer IP rights to effectively serve the global community.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

August 11, 2003, at the Jordan IP Week Conference, Amman, Jordan.

Communication , Speed

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Quoted in "The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age" by Richard C. Duncan http://dieoff.org/page125.htm
Originally from Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).

Intelligence , Sense

“The special effects are more sophisticated. The materials and techniques used to construct the monster costumes and miniature sets have improved, and we now use computer graphics. However, the earlier Godzilla films are much more profound. I think the reason for this is the fact that the people who worked on them experienced World War II firsthand. Shinichi Sekizawa served in the South Pacific, and Mr. Honda was a prisoner of war in China for quite some time. The earlier films also are more detailed. For example, there are more reaction shots in them. The expressions on people's faces are shown more often, and the effects of the monsters' actions are shown more often. On the other hand, the newer movies are more contemporary in that they address current issues such as bio-technology and environmental destruction. The earlier films didn't do that as much.”

Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

War , People , World , Thinking

“The foundation of all technology is fire.”

Isaac Asimov book Asimov's Chronology of the World

Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991), p. 11
General sources

“The principal applications of any sufficiently new and innovative technology always have been—and will continue to be—applications created by that technology.”

Herbert Kroemer (1928) Nobel laureate in physics

in his Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2000/kroemer-lecture.html, Quasi-Electric Fields and Band Offsets: Teaching Electrons New Tricks, 8 December 2000, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University.

“There are three kinds of writing in economics: Greek-letter, up-and-down, and airport. Greek-letter writing formal, theoretical, mathematical is how professors communicate. Like any academic field, economics has its fair share of hacks and phonies, who use complicated language to hide the banality of their ideas; it also contains profound thinkers, who use the specialized language of the discipline as an efficient way to express deep insights. […] Up-and-down economics is what one encounters on the business pages of newspapers, or for that matter on TV. It is preoccupied with the latest news and the latest numbers, hence its name. […] Finally, airport economics is the language of economics bestsellers. These books are most prominently displayed at airport bookstores, where the delayed business traveler is likely to buy them. Most of these books predict disaster: a new great depression, the evisceration of our economy by Japanese multinationals, the collapse of our money. A minority have the opposite view, a boundless optimism: new technology or supply-side economics is about to lead us into an era of unprecedented economic progress. Whether pessimistic or optimistic, airport economics is usually fun, rarely well informed, and never serious.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Preface
The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990; 1994; 1997)

Money , Books , Way , Travel

“I’ve watched how, in a blink of an eye, technology went from products used by the very few, to ending up in the pockets of billions, bringing social change and corporate disruption.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Dalhousie University Commencement Speech (2017)

Change

“During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale…”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

"On Dialogue"

World , Travel , Feeling , Communication

“Good jobs also depend on reliable and affordable energy. This Congress must act to encourage conservation, promote technology, build infrastructure, and it must act to increase energy production at home so America is less dependent on foreign oil.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Home , Dependency

“These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 199

Life , Freedom , Fight

“This effort is shared with other Indian intellectuals, e. g. with Claude Alvares who shows how “attempts were made to destroy non-Western technologies”, and until recently if not today, “even the idea that other cultures may have had thriving technologies was calculatingly destroyed.””

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001)

Idea , Effort

“Two views on the scope of technology have pervaded (and shaped) studies of technology, reflecting the different claims to generalizability that researchers have intended with their work. The one set of studies has focused on technology as "hardware," that is, the equipment, machines, and instruments that humans use in productive activities, whether industrial or informational devices.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 399

Study

“By picking this particular fight [with the FBI], Apple is doing the technology industry a big disservice. … Apple will very likely lose this case in the courts and suffer a public relations disaster.”

Vivek Wadhwa American academic

Apple picked the wrong battle in privacy war http://dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2016/02/18/vivek-wadhwa-apple-picked-the-wrong-battle-in-privacy-war in The Dallas Morning News (18 February 2016)

Suffering , Fight

“The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years…we've leapt ahead in all material terms, but the Muslim world would say we have fallen down in all spiritual and moral terms. We have to accept our share of the blame and they have to accept theirs.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

http://www.epolitix.com/EN/Interviews/200508/88b20915-9848-4644-8f17-97ca62e4e341.htm

World , Religion , Art , Literature

“I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.”

Jaron Lanier (1960) American computer scientist, musician, and author

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Hope , Intelligence

“Technology has always been a central variable in organizational theory, informing research and practice. Despite years of investigative effort there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of technology, and no compelling evidence on the precise role of technology in organizational affairs. I will argue that the divergent definitions and opposing perspectives associated with technological research have limited our understanding of how technology interacts with organizations, and that these incompatibilities cannot be resolved by mutual concession. What is needed is a reconstruction of the concept of technology, which fundamentally re-examines our current notions of technology and its role in organizations.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 389

Understanding , Effort

“Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1956)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Art , Music , Literature , Optimism

“Is object-oriented technology mature enough upon which to build industrial-strength systems? Absolutely. Does this technology scale? Indeed. Is it the sole technology worth considering? No way. Is there some better technology we should be using in the future? Possibly, but I am clueless as to what that might be.
It is dangerous to make predictions, especially in a discipline that changes so rapidly, but one thing I can say with confidence is that I have seen the future, and it is object-oriented.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object Solutions: Managing the Object-Oriented Project. (1996), p. 277

Way , Confidence , Change , Future

“They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 198

People , Idea , Understanding , Decision

“While science and technology play critical roles in sustaining modern civilization, they are not part of our culture in the sense that they are not commonly studied or well comprehended. Neither the potential nor the limitations of science are understood so that what can be achieved and what is beyond reach are not comprehended. The line between science and magic becomes blurred so that public judgments on technical issues can be erratic or badly flawed. It frequently appears that some people will believe almost anything. Thus judgments can be manipulated or warped by unscrupulous groups. Distortions or outright falsehoods can come to be accepted as fact.”

Henry Way Kendall (1926–1999) American physicist

Variant: [Henry Way Kendall, A distant light: scientists and public policy, Springer, 2000, 0387988335, 4]

People , Sense , Study , Appearance

“Every major technological innovation propels humanity forward to the point of no return.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

“The Green Revolution was criticised by social activists on the ground that the high-yield technology involving the use of mineral fertilizers and chemical pesticides is environmentally harmful. Similarly, some economists felt that the new technologies would bypass small and marginal farmers, for although the technologies are scale-neutral, they are not resource-neutral. This led to my coining the term “ever-green revolution,” to emphasise the need to enhance productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm.”

M. S. Swaminathan (1925) Indian scientist

Quoted in Food as people's right, 4 January 2012, 25 November 2013, The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/food-as-peoples-right/article2769348.ece,

“Our economy, society, and culture are built on interests, values, institutions, and systems of representation that, by and large, limit collective creativity, confiscate the harvest of information technology, and deviate our energy into self-destructive confrontation. This state of affairs must not be.”

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

Source: End of Millennium, 1998, p. 379

“The coordination of information technology management presents a challenge to firms with dispersed IT practices. Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources.
Here we explore three major mechanisms for facilitating inter-unit coordination of IT management: structural design approaches, functional coordination modes, and computer-based communication systems. We define these various mechanisms and their interrelationships, and we discuss the relative costs and benefits associated with alternative coordination approaches.
To illustrate the cost-benefit tradeoffs of coordination approaches, we present a case study in which computer-based communication systems were used to support team-based coordination of IT management across dispersed business units. Our analysis reveals possibilities for future approaches to IT coordination in large, dispersed organizations.”

Gerardine DeSanctis (1954–2005) American organizational theorist

Gerardine DeSanctis and Brad M. Jackson (1994) "Coordination of information technology management: Team-based structures and computer-based communication systems." Journal of Management Information Systems Vol 10 (4). p. 85-110. Abstract

Communication , Business , Support , Study

“Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.”

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

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 86

Fate

“As I travel around the country I am seeing something new emerging across regional Australia. It is a new way of doing things, taking the great traditions that made the bush what it is today and blending it with the new. There's innovation, new technology and new potential, it's almost as if there's a quiet revolution going on….. some people call it the new bush.”

Lee Kernaghan (1964) Australian country music singer-songwriter

People , Way , Travel , Country

“Modern technology is not simply an extension of human making through the power of a perfected science, but is a new account of what it is to know and to make in which both activities are changed by their co-penetration.”

George Grant (1918–1988) Canadian philosopher

Technology and Justice (Notre Dame: 1986), p. 13

Science , Change , Perfection

“The power to hurt… has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.”

Roger Zelazny book He Who Shapes

He Who Shapes (1965)

Hurt

“Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Sweet Morality (p. 235)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Death , Nature , Knowledge , Science

“The INFOSPHERE we are heading towards invokes the inherent risk of being the sphere of the developed, the few. Unless we can bridge the technological gap between the 20% and the 80% of the global population, we will be heading towards an ugly world with ugly consequences.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

November 16, 1999, Amman, Jordan, Speech entitled : Technology in the Next Millennium.

World

“Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 28-30.

Life , World , Question , Support

““But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’” Dearri said, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it?”
“You ask questions like a true profiteer,” Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 224)

Soul , Understanding , Question

“The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge. This transformation was signalled by McGregor, but we must go further.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Thomas Kochan, Wanda Orlikowski, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld. "Beyond McGregor's theory Y," in: Douglas McGregor (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise; Annotated Edition, 2006, p. 366

People , Nature , Knowledge

“Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter VII : "It's Just Like Living", p. 182

Family

“Space has not changed but technology has, in many cases, improved dramatically. A good example is digital technology where today's cell phones are far more powerful than the computers on the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module that we used to navigate to the moon and operate all the spacecraft control systems.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

On the differences between the present and the time of the space race which existed during the Cold War years, in an interview at The New Space Race (August 2007)

Change

“Prophecy is a critical response to the "urban revolution," that irreversible commitment of the human race to the city and civilization which spread outward from the "Nile to Oxus" heartland beginning around 3000 B. C. Prophecy is the perception of the potentialities, both for "good" and for "evil," inherent in the new social structure. The urban complex makes a process of world unification in one sense—commercial, technological—inevitable, and makes world unification in another sense—the peaceable Kingdom—ever more problematical. The whole prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to the injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war … that has been its history from start to finish.”

Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) classicist

Source: "The Prophetic Tradition" (1982), p. 367

War , World , History , Sense

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

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Little Brother (2008)

Love

“Innovation - the heart of technological change - is fundamentally a learning process.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 4, Technology: The Engine of change, p. 115

Learning , Change , Heart

“The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff. Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision. It’s just a means to an end. We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the internet. I mean, get out there, communicate. Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet. Let’s get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging. I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span. There’s too much technology available. I’m sure, as far as music goes, it would be much more interesting than it is today.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Elton John, blaming the internet for destroying good music http://www.gigwise.com/news/35721/elton-john-wants-to-tear-down-the-internet (2 August 2007)

People , World , Art , Music

“There is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realisation of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilisation just when its very realisation has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding.”

George Grant (1918–1988) Canadian philosopher

Technology and Justice (Notre Dame: 1986), p. 34

Way , Understanding , Question

“To call for decentralization, representative bureaucracy, collegial authority, or employee-centered, innovative or organic organizations - to mention only a few of the highly normative prescriptions that are being offered by social scientists today - is to call for a type of structure that can be realized only with a certain type of technology, unless we are willing to pay a high cost in terms of output. Given a routine technology, the much maligned Weberian bureaucracy probably constitutes the socially optimum form of organizational structure.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 204