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Technology: No Place for Wimps!
-Scott Adams, "Dilbert"
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People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.
-J. G. Ballard
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As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association and affection.
-Wendell Berry
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Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of Information can drive our Knowledge.
[on computarization of libraries]
-Daniel J. Boorstin, "New York Times", July 8, 1983
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Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
-Omar Bradley
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We've been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves.
We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God.
-John Brunner, Judas [1967]
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Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
-Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution, 1837
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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
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Tame your technology … or it will become your master. In today’s highly connected world, you must define boundaries around your time.
-Lee J. Colan, 107 Ways to Stick to It
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"Everything that can be invented, has been invented."
-Charles H. Duell, 1899
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The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
-Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, Harper and Row, New York, 1988, p 135
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The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
-Albert Einstein
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard Feynman
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The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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Technology is very seductive, and it is certainly changing the way things are designed and made and taught. The problem is when technology has seduced you away from thinking about things as deeply as you should.
-Arthur Ganson
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"For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork."
-Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think, 1999
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Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.
-Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)
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"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."
-Aldous Huxley
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 "The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Inaugural Address
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"Through radio I look forward to a united states of the world. Radio is standardizing the peoples of the earth, English will become the universal language because it is predominantly the language of the ether. The most important aspect of radio is its sociological influence"
-Arthur Edwin Kennelly, 1926
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“I celebrate the modern world in all its glory, with all its machines, its conveniences and its comforts. To love life is to drink up all of it, to do it all, to hug it as our own.”
-John Lachs, In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die
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A technician is a man who understands everything about his job except its ultimate purpose and its place in the order of the universe.
-Richard Livingstone
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"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools."
-Marshall McLuhan
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A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things.... What we dread most, in the face of the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable.... We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quakey.
-Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, preface, 1945
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O misery, misery, mumble and moan!
Someone invented the telephone,
And interrupted a nation's slumbers,
Ringing wrong but similar numbers.
-Ogden Nash, Look What You Did, Christopher
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"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
N.B.: This is a paraphrase from the ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, On the invention of the atom bomb
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"It may be that in the future the great intellectual struggle will be waged between the Christian faith and the scientific world view. The opponents, of course, will not be science and technology in themselves, but the various philosophies nurtured by the modern climate of opinion and reinforced by the misuse of the fruits of technology."
-D. R. G. Owen
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One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
-Terry Pratchett
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“If we are on a path of getting nowhere fast, technology is allowing us to get nowhere faster and faster.”
-John Renesch
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Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures— in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery, "Terre des Hommes" (translated into English as "Wind, Sand, and Stars"), 1939
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
-E. F. [Ernst Friedrich] Schumacher
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"If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."
-William Bradford Shockley
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Technology...is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
-C.P. (Charles Percy) Snow, "New York Times", March 15, 1971
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Kranzberg’s First Law: Technology is neither good nor bad—nor is it neutral. At the risk of spoiling its Zenlike nature, let me propose an interpretation: a technology isn’t inherently good or bad, but it will have an impact, which is why it’s not neutral. Almost every applied technology has a good side and a bad side. When you think of transportation technologies, do you think of how they enable a delightful vacation or get the family back together during the holidays—or do you think of traffic jams and pollution? Are books a source of wisdom and spirituality or a way to distribute pornography and hate? Do you applaud medical technology for curing plagues or deplore transportation technology for spreading them? Does encrypted e-mail keep honest people safe from criminals or criminals safe from the police? Are plastics durable conveniences or everlasting pollutants? Counterfeiting comes with money, obscene phone calls come with the telephone, spam comes with e-mail, and pornography comes with the Internet. Every law creates an outlaw.
-Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
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If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.
-Mark Twain, A majestic literary fossil. In: Twain M. The £1,000,000 bank note and other new stories. New York: Webster, 1893: 241
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You ask about the important things to keep in mind: same as ever, with a task-based twist: what are the users trying to accomplish, what does the business need them to successfully accomplish, and what will the technology allow? If you can balance these three forces, you'll have a solid product.
-Christina Wodtke
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If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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Books about Technology
