Technology

"What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent."

"Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you're able to scale up almost anything you can think up. ... We'll have to see if in our lifetime that means that everybody has more or less tools that are of equal power."

"All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed."

"The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world."

"Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge."

"It makes sense to examine Plato and pottery together in order to understand the Greek world, Descartes and the mechanical clock together in order to understand Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same way, it makes sense to regard the computer as a technological paradigm for the science, the philosophy, even the art of the coming generation."

"Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed."

"You know, his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” end of quote. Six day lec- — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the p- — potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time — perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy and our security, our society, our very — for humanity."

"Technology and the machine resurrected San Francisco while Pompeii still slept in her ashes."

"The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth."

"During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think."

"The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century—sex and paranoia."

"Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute."

"We have become a people unable to comprehend the technology we invent."

"But of all environments, that produced by man's complex technology is perhaps the most unstable and rickety. In its present form, our society is not two centuries old, and a few nuclear bombs will do it in. To be sure, evolution works over long periods of time and two centuries is far from sufficient to breed Homo technikos.... The destruction of our technological society in a fit of nuclear peevishness would become disastrous even if there were many millions of immediate survivors. The environment toward which they were fitted would be gone, and Darwin's demon would wipe them out remorselessly and without a backward glance."

"Asimov: Science fiction always bases its future visions on changes in the levels of science and technology. And the reason for that consistency is simply that—in reality—all other changes throughout history have been irrelevant and trivial. For example, what difference did it make to the people of the ancient world that Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire? Obviously, that event made some difference to a lot of individuals. But if you look at humanity in general, you'll see that life went on pretty much as it had before the conquest. On the other hand, consider the changes that were made in people's daily lives by the development of agriculture or the mariner's compass ... and by the invention of gunpowder or printing. Better yet, look at recent history and ask yourself, "What difference would it have made if Hitler had won World War II?" Of course, such a victory would have made a great difference to many people. It would have resulted in much horror, anguish, and pain. I myself would probably not have survived. But Hitler would have died eventually, and the effects of his victory would gradually have washed out and become insignificant—in terms of real change—when compared to such advances as the actual working out of nuclear power, the advent of television, or the invention of the jet plane."

"The technical genius which could find answers ... was not cooped up in military or civilian bureaucracy, but was to be found in universities and in the people at large."

"Only among those who were engaged in a particular activity did their language remain unchanged; so, for in­stance, there was one for all the architects, one for all the carriers of stones, one for all the stone-breakers, and so on for all the different opera­tions. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity."

"Incorrigible humanity, therefore, led astray by the giant Nimrod, presumed in its heart to outdo in skill not only nature but the source of its own nature, who is God; and began to build a tower in Sennaar, which afterwards was called Babel (that is, 'confusion'). By this means human beings hoped to climb up to heaven, intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator."

"Technique without art is shallow and doomed. Art without technique is insulting."

"It makes sense to examine Plato and pottery together in order to understand the Greek world, Descartes and the mechanical clock together in order to understand Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same way, it makes sense to regard the computer as a technological paradigm for the science, the philosophy, even the art of the coming generation."

"The clock has been the center of Western technology since its invention in the Middle Ages. Computer technology too finds it indispensable, although it has changed the clock from a mechanical device to a wholly electronic one."

"In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists."

"I have bought this wonderful machine- a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine- it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy."

"Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend."

"Starting when computer technology first emerged during World War II and continuing into the 1960s, women made up most of the computing workforce. By 1970, however, women only accounted for 13.6% of bachelor's in computer science graduates. In 1984 that number rose to 37%, but it has since declined to 18% -- around the same time personal computers started showing up in homes. According to NPR, personal computers were marketed almost exclusively to men and families were more likely to buy computers for boys than girls."

"To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world—increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward."

"This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right."

"If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result."

"The simple fact is that without supporting directives or a mechanism for feedback, security is defined differently by each person and verified by no one. There is no metric for compliance with a "culture", and a "culture of security" is overridden by a culture of "get the job done" every time. If there are rules, write them down. If technology is put in place to implement or monitor the rules, write that down too. If people break the rules, follow up. If the rules prevent legitimate business from getting done, change them. It's that simple."

"It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypotheses that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities."

"Spock: Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it or him."

""So computers are tools of the devil?" thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him."

"A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year."

"Where a calculator like the ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons."

"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger."

"Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind."

"These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer."

"The Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform."

"Dare to be gorgeous and unique. But don't ever be cryptic or otherwise unfathomable. Make it unforgettably great."

"The Joker: Do you know how many times we've come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen?"

"The reality is that future cyber warfare will likely resemble medieval siege warfare – as critical infrastructure and vital services to a city's population are shut-down and locked-out as a result of a ransomware attack."

"Today's computers are not even close to a 4-year-old human in their ability to see, talk, move, or use common sense. One reason, of course, is sheer computing power. It has been estimated that the information processing capacity of even the most powerful supercomputer is equal to the nervous system of a snail—a tiny fraction of the power available to the supercomputer inside [our] skull."

"But if these machines were ingenious, what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man?"

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

"An adversary capable of implanting the right virus or accessing the right terminal can cause massive damage."

"By the '80s, the early pioneering work done by female programmers had mostly been forgotten. In contrast, Hollywood was putting out precisely the opposite image: Computers were a male domain. In hit movies like "Revenge of the Nerds," "Weird Science," "Tron," "WarGames" and others, the computer nerds were nearly always young white men. Video games, a significant gateway activity that led to an interest in computers, were pitched far more often at boys, as research in 1985 by Sara Kiesler, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, found. "In the culture, it became something that guys do and are good at," says Kiesler, who is also a program manager at the National Science Foundation. "There were all kinds of things signaling that if you don't have the right genes, you're not welcome.""

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."

"Computers with their binary on–off logic seem to appeal to the military mind. This is because the military, in order to counter the inherent confusion and danger of war, is forever seeking ways to make communications as terse and unambiguous as humanly possible. Computers by their very nature do just that. Had they only been able to stand at attention and salute, in many ways they would have made ideal soldiers."

"With computers acting as the stimulus, the theory of war was assimilated into that of microeconomics. . . . Instead of evaluating military operations by their product –that is, victory – calculations were cast in terms of input–output and cost effectiveness. Since intuition was replaced by calculation, and since the latter wasto be carried out with the aid of computers, it was necessary that all the phenomena of war be reduced to quantitative form. Consequently everything that could be quantified was, while everything that could not be tended to be thrown onto the garbage heap."