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Quotes about technology

114 quotes from 61 people

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Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
Buckminster Fuller1895–1983
Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
E. B. White1899–1985“The Old and the New,” The New Yorker (19 June 1937)
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862Walden (1854), pp. 60-61In context
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Isaac Asimov1920–1992“Runaround” in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942)
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Isaac Asimov1920–1992“Runaround” in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942)
Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881The Idiot (1868–9), Part 3, Chapter 1 (tr. Constance Garnett, 1913)
- Genius
We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.
Carl Sagan1934–1996Bringing Science Down to Earth (1994), co-authored with Anne Kalosh, in Hemispheres (October 1994), p. 99
- Science
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley1894–1963Ends and Means (1937), Ch. 1, p. 9 [2012 reprint]
- Change
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.
William Gibsonborn 1948“The Science in Science Fiction”, Talk of the Nation, NPR (30 November 1999)
- Time
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
Nassim Nicholas Talebborn 1960The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31
- History
If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.
Pope Benedict XVI1927–2022Spe Salvi, encyclical, sec. 22 (30 November 2007)
- Morality
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
EDEdsger W. Dijkstra1930–2002How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
Douglas Adams1952–2001The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
Grace Hopper1906–1992On the removal of a 2-inch-long moth from the Harvard Mark II experimental computer at Harvard in 1947, as quoted in Time 16 April 1984
- Computers
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Isaac Asimov1920–1992“Runaround” in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942)