Technology

"With the advent of metal tools in the and later in the the arts of wood-working became more precise and more specialized. ...By 2800 B.C. it could be said that a complete mastery over wood had been achieved in the most advanced civilizations. ... had been invented in Egypt where wood was scarce and plywood with six alternate layers of different varieties of wood was made. The plies were usually fastened together by wooden pegs. Twelve centuries later, in the Eighteenth Dynasty, veneering was practised and inlaying with ivory and ebony and overlaying with gold, silver and copper had been perfected. Nails were usually wood pegs but for delicate work minute metal nails were used. The for smoothing... was one of the principal tools of the carpenter, with a blade up to 18 in. wide, for the wood plane was not invented until Roman times. The increasing skill... is particularly evident in the wooden carts and s that have been discovered."

"Cease from grinding, ye women who toil at the mill; sleep late, even if the crowing cocks announce the dawn. For has ordered the s to perform the work of your hands, and they, leaping down on top of the wheel, turn its axle which, with its revolving spokes, turns the heavy concave Nisyrian mill-stones. We taste again the joys of the primitive life, learning to feast on the products of Demeter without labour."

"To rob Britain of her steam engines would be to rob her of her coal and iron, to deprive her of her sources of wealth, to ruin her prosperity, to annihilate that collosal power."

"Kierkegaard drew his point -- you can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again. One might also add that the duck who is tamed will never do anywhere any more. We are convinced that any business model needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them. (1963)"

"We accept out responsibilities as a corporate citizen in community, national and world affairs; we serve our interests best when we serve the public interest. We believe that the immediate and long-term public interest is best served in a system of competing enterprises. Therefore, we believe we should compete vigorously, but in a spirit of fair play, with respect to our competitors, and with respect for the law. In communities where IBM facilities are located, we do our utmost to create an environment in which people want to work and live. We agknowledge our obligation as a business to help improve the quality of the society we are part of. We want to be in the forefront of those companies which are working to make the world a better place. (1969)"

"Failure to delegate is the biggest single obstacle to job performance in IBM. (1959)"

"The employee relations of this company were founded long ago upon the Golden Rule and we expect all of our managers in working with their people to start with this fundamental. In keeping with this, we will continue to be sensitive to any personal problem which may temporarily affect an employee's performance. (1960)"

"We believe in the importance of the individual in IBM and we'll never forget it. We think it's more important than the most fantastic electronic product that we could ever invent. (1957)"

"I know that IBMers everywhere are working harder than ever to meet heavy customer demand. But none of us is so important that our job and the company can't get along without us once in a while. The employee who chronically delays a vacation is not doing himself or anybody any good. He may be unknowingly tampering with his own health and well-being; and he is shortchanging his family. .... It's not how many miles you travel that matters. What counts is the distance you put between yourself and that daily routine. (1979)"

"There are many things I would like IBM to be known for, but no matter how big we become, I want this company to be known as the company which has the greatest respect for the individual. (1957)"

"The pursuit of perfection means not just enthusiasm for doing a topnotch job in important things, it means attention to detail and an itch to innovate and improve in whatever we have to do. It means to be dissatisfied with the status quo. ... We ought to know precisely why a given job is done in a particular way, and why it is done at all, and why it can't be done more effectively, if it must be done at all. This is the attitude that built our modern industrial society. It is the attitude that built IBM. I hope we never lose it. (1962)"

"All successful companies have good strategies. They all have good processes. They reward people for the right things. For the companies that truly break through, it comes down to their people. For us, it's not a question of talent. We have the best people in the industry. I knew that before I came to IBM, and I know it today, But are our people going to stretch to their potential - step up and lead? That's the real issue for IBM. What's really important is the personal commitment that each of us makes about how we're going to behave, how much we care, how much we're willing to give, how much we're willing to learn and adapt, what we think about every day that drives what we do operationally. It comes back to win, execute and team. Those are not slogans or even institutional values. They are personal commitments. They're not things of the head, they're things of the heart and the gut. They are behavioral, not intellectual. You do not get up every morning and salute them. You get up every morning and live them. We have completed, for the most part, the task of restructuring the institution. Our success now is going to be a function of personal behavior - the behavior of each and every one of us. (1998)"

"Around the time that IBM introduced the PC, a catch phrase in the industry was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.""

"The author convincingly shows the relentless efforts made by IBM to maximize profit by selling its machines and its punch cards to a country whose criminal record would soon be widely recognized. Indeed, Black demonstrates with great precision that the godlike owner of the corporation, Thomas Watson, was impervious to the moral dimension of his dealings with Hitler's Germany and for years even had a soft spot for the Nazi regime."

"We encourage frankness in IBM; we encourage everyone to speak out. Let's make it a daily habit. (1972)"

"The solution is IBM."

"Recently, icdn's role as a willing accomplice in the mass murders of Gypsies — and indeed, the larger question of its Swiss operation — has come back to haunt the technology company. Big Blue has refused to answer the charges since the first simultaneous disclosures in 40 countries on February 11, 2001, that IBM knowingly systemized Hitler's persecution and extermination of Europe's Jews, directly from New York and through its subsidiaries in Europe coordinated through the Swiss office. But on June 22, a Swiss appellate Court ruled that a compensation suit filed by the Gypsy (Roma) (Roma) International Recognition and Compensation Action could proceed. "The precision, speed and reliability of IBM's machines," the Swiss judge ruled, "especially related to the censuses of the German population and racial biology by the Nazis, were praised in the publications of Dehomag itself, the branch of respondent IBM. It does not thus seem unreasonable to deduce that IBM's technical assistance facilitated the tasks of the Nazis in the commission of their crimes against humanity, acts also involving accountancy and classification by IBM machines and utilized in the concentration camps themselves." The judge's ruling pointedly added: "In view of the preceding, IBM's complicity with material and intellectual assistance in the criminal acts of the Nazis during the Second World War by means of its Geneva establishment does not appear to be ruled out, as there is a great deal of evidence indicating that the Geneva establishment was aware that it was aiding and supporting these acts.""

"Fighting for your convictions can be a lonely business. But it's my observation that the people who get ahead in IBM are the ones who are willing to do just that. (1973)"

"In recent years, there has been a widespread and growing public concern about the need to protect the individual's right to privacy. It is my belief that few issues will prove to be of greater significance to IBM. ... I am determined that we in IBM practice internally what we propose externally for out customers and the society generally. Accordingly, last year I asked for an intensive examination of our personnel practices to make sure that we are doing everything possible to protect the privacy of our own employees. That is a complex effort but it has been a fruitful one. While not complete, it has taken us a long way toward my personal goal of establishing IBM as the leader in employee privacy. (1974)"

"IBM has consistently refused to allow access to its Swiss office files, pppp itself was some 60 years ago, Bukovinsky quipped, "So what. What is the point?""

"Digitization is, in a way, a disruptive force, a disruptive technological force that brings about deep-seated change, transformation of a society. Look at the history of the printing press -- when this was invented, what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization -- what sort of consequences that had. Very often it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies, and it took a while until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and to manage and steer this. And I think we live in a period of profound transformation, very similar to when we had a translation from agricultural societies to industrial societies."

"Colonel: In the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander. All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. The digital society furthers human flaws, and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths."

"Fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one’s aim has been forgotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends."

"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."

"No new choices are introduced by raising the specter of disaster. These become opportunities for swearing new allegiance to technology. The solution is to discover new technologies that will correct and modify the harm either potentially or already caused by present technologies."

"Many of our fellow citizens do not share the blind faith in the simple beneficence of all technological innovation. And because they do not share the corporealist, morally neutral, and in some cases atheistic world-view that they attribute (fairly or not) to science and scientists, they are reluctant to surrender the power of decision to the very people who they think are creating the problem."

"Could technology, understood as the disposition and activity of mastery, turn out to be a stumbling block in the path of the master himself?"

"The bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be."

"The liberating force of technology—the instrumentalization of things—turns into ... the instrumentalization of man."

"The technologist's mania for putting the Creation to use, because he can't tolerate it as a partner, can't do anything with it; technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance, for example, of diluting by speed, so that we don't have to experience it."

"The normality of the world we live in is completely insane."

"Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power."

"No technique is possible when men are free. When technique enters into the realm of social life, it collides ceaselessly with the human being to the degree that the combination of man and technique is unavoidable, and that technical action necessarily results in a determined result. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. For technique, this is a matter of life or death. Technique must reduce man to a technical animal, the king of the slaves of technique. Human caprice crumbles before this necessity; there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy. The individual must be fashioned by techniques, either negatively (by the techniques of understanding man) or positively (by the adaptation of man to the technical framework), in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization."

"Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it."

"We may quote here Jacques Soustelle’s well-known remark of May, 1960, in reference to the atomic bomb. ... “Since it was possible, it was necessary.” Really a master phrase for all technical evolution."

"In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. A simple example: a dam has been built somewhere, and it bursts. Who is responsible for that? Geologists worked out. They examined the terrain. Engineers drew up the construction plans. Workmen constructed it. And the politicians decided that the dam had to be in that spot. Who is responsible? No one. There is never anyone responsible. Anywhere. In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. But no one is free either. Everyone has his own, specific task. And that's all he has to do."

"As long as technique was represented by exclusively by the machine, it was possible to speak of “man and machine.” The machine remained an external object, and man (though significantly influenced by it in his professional, private, and psychic life) remained none the less independent. He was in a position to assert himself apart from the machine; he was able to adopt a position with respect to it."

"In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world."

"Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."

"Scientific and technological “solutions” which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction."

"La técnica no cumple los viejos sueños del hombre, sino los remeda con sorna."

"En lugar de humanizar la técnica el moderno prefiere tecnificar al hombre."

"The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one."

"La técnica ofrecería menos peligros si su manipuleo no le fuese tan fácil al imbécil y tan rentable al caco."

"Technology ... aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital."

"Nastasha Romanenko: What awaited Snake after his brief encounter with Liquid was Ocelot's KGB-tested 'interrogation' techniques. Ocelot apparently had no interest in extracting information, but rather appeared to be enjoying the acts of torture for their own sake. Snake's ragged gasps echoed from the radio in the silence of the control room. The heart rate and other physiological data transmitted by his nanomachines graphically demonstrated the extent of his suffering."

"Nastasha Romanenko: Solid Snake certainly managed to live up to his reputation. He adroitly wove his way through the enemy's patrols and infiltrated the nuclear weapons disposal plant, where he made contact with Donald Anderson, the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) director. Throughout the mission, we had radio monitoring capability over Snake's every movement thanks to his internal nanomachines."

"Regarding microbial adaptability, it makes no difference if a bacterium has acquired multiple drug resistance to antibiotics or to any other traditional treatment – the microbivore will eat it anyway, achieving complete clearance of even the most severe septicemic infections in minutes to hours, as compared to weeks or even months for antibiotic-assisted natural phagocytic defenses, without increasing the risk of sepsis or septic shock. Hence microbivores, each 2-3 microns in size, appear to be up to ~1000 times faster-acting than either unaided natural or antibiotic-assisted biological phagocytic defenses, and can extend the doctor’s reach to the entire range of potential bacterial threats, including locally dense infections."

"Ames: The President's own vital signs -- heartbeat, brainwave pattern, blood pressure and so on -- are constantly monitored and relayed by his internal nanomachines. This information along with the DNA pattern serve as a biometric password, unbreakable even by the latest parallel processor supercomputers. The password entry itself cannot be performed unless brainwave patterns and heartbeats fall within normal parameters, rendering chemical and other forms of coercion impractical."

"The key issue for enabling full-immersion reality is obtaining the necessary bandwidth inside the body, which should be available using the in vivo fiber network I first proposed in Nanomedicine, Vol. I (1999). Such a network can handle 1018 bits/sec of data traffic, capacious enough for real-time brain-state monitoring. The fiber network has a 30 cm3 volume and generates 4-6 watts waste heat, both small enough for safe installation in a 1400 cm3 25-watt human brain. Signals travel at most a few meters at nearly the speed of light, so transit time from signal origination at neuron sites inside the brain to the external computer system mediating the upload are ~0.00001 millisec which is considerably less than the minimum ~5 millisec neuron discharge cycle time. Neuron-monitoring chemical sensors located on average ~2 microns apart can capture relevant chemical events occurring within a ~5 millisec time window, since this is the approximate diffusion time for, say, a small neuropeptide across a 2-micron distance. Thus human brain state monitoring can probably be “instantaneous,” at least on the timescale of human neural response, in the sense of “nothing of significance was missed."