quotations about technology
The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, "Get out." You know there's an explanation for all this somewhere and what it's doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn't what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
As cities grow and technology takes over the world belief and imagination fade away and so do we.
JULIE KAGAWA
The Iron King
It seems pretty crazy that companies can devote all of their time and resources to making us addicted to a piece of technology. At one point, inventors just wanted to make life easier and more comfortable for us. They replaced iceboxes with temperature-regulated refrigerators and button-up dresses with zippered ones.
ANUM YOON
"How Technology Is Designed to be Addictive", Paste Magazine, June 7, 2017
I hate technology. It provides so many different channels of loneliness. Every time you check your email and don't see a new message, you know that, even though people have the ability to contact you at any time of the day from anywhere on the planet, no one is interested in doing so. Phones are constant reminders that 160 people you know fairly well have nothing to say to you most of the time.
ADI ALSAID
Somewhere Over the Sun
Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.
DAN BROWN
Angels & Demons
Technology is the engine; the humanities are the steering wheel and the brakes. The humanities don't create nearly as much force for getting things done as technology does, but technology is just plain lousy at directing its energy or managing itself.
JAMES ALAN GARDNER
Strange Horizons, January 7, 2002
Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain.
RICHARD RHODES
Visions Of Technology: A Century Of Vital Debate About Machines Systems
Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
LAURIE ANDERSON
attributed, Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy
Technology is the procedure by which scientific man masters nature for the purpose of moulding his existence, delivering himself from want, and giving his environment the form that appeals to him.
KARL JASPERS
The Origin and Goal of History
You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out.... It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies. But it's also life, isn't it? It prolongs life, it provides new organs for those that wear out. New devices, new techniques every day. Lasers, masers, ultrasound. Give yourself up to it.... Believe in it. They'll insert you in a gleaming tube, irradiate your body with the basic stuff of the universe. Light, energy, dreams. God's own goodness.
DON DELILLO
White Noise
We are trapped in technology because we are so unbelievably impressed by technology ... Technology is not the problem, our approach to technology is the problem.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Guardian, December 7, 2015
The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can't know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strategy to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We're increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011
Technology happens. It's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?
ANDREW GROVE
Time Magazine, December 29, 1997
New technology is the true friend of full employment; the indispensable ally of progress; and the surest guarantee of prosperity.
MARGARET THATCHER
speech opening Shell UK Exploration Centre, September 7, 1979
The true test, as with any technology, is the ability to use it to make a profit.
EMILY ATKINS
"A game of tags: Winning and losing with RFID", MM&D, January 13, 2017
Any technology is only as strong as its content, which in turn depends on and influences the community.
MUDIT MOHILAY
"Facebook will license out its brand new 360-degree cameras with 6-degrees of freedom", The Tech Portal, April 19, 2017
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
CARL SAGAN
"Why We Need to Understand Science", Skeptical Inquirer, spring 1990
I know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring good deeds out into the world. Scientists not only conceived nuclear weapons; they also took political leaders by the lapels, arguing that their nation -- whichever it happened to be -- had to have one first.... There's a reason people are nervous about science and technology ... the image of the mad scientist haunts our world--from Dr. Faust to Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Strangelove to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning children's television. (All this doesn't inspire budding scientists.) But there's no way back. We can't just conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed the world. The sword of science is double-edged. Rather, its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility -- more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.
CARL SAGAN
"Why We Need to Understand Science", Skeptical Inquirer, spring 1990