Quotes on the nature and scope of technology

The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.
Ada Lovelace

Fire is our first form of technology.
Ridley Scott

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
Steven Spielberg

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
Max Frisch

All art is dependent on technology because it’s a human endeavour, so even when you’re using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that’s technology.
George Lucas

Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology.
Vinod Khosla

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.
Margaret Atwood

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C.Clarke

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.
Ginni Rometty

Science – or the products of science like technology – is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.
Richard Dawkins

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we’re surrounded by things we can’t see.
Louie Schwartzberg

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Quotes on the relationship between technology and values

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.
Bill Gates

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
Margaret Atwood

AI is neither good nor evil. It’s a tool. It’s a technology for us to use.
Oren Etzioni

There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we’re bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we’re good people we use it for good purposes.
Herbert A. Simon

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein

Technology and social media have brought power back to the people.
Mark McKinnon

Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.
Simon Mainwaring

You know, I believe that technology is the great leveler. Technology permits anybody to play. And in some ways, I think technology – it’s not only a great tool for democratization, but it’s a great tool for eliminating prejudice and advancing meritocracies.
Carly Fiorina

So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn’t growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.
Ellen Ullman

Technology itself is neither good nor bad. People are good or bad.
Naveen Jain

Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.
Laura Esquivel

Quotes on the communication of ideas in technology

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.
Daniel Bell

We have more media than ever and more technology in our lives. It’s supposed to help us communicate, but it has the opposite effect of isolating us.
Tracy Chapman

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
Marshall McLuhan
 
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
 
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.
JG Ballard
 
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Marshall McLuhan

You affect the world by what you browse.
Tim Berners-Lee

Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say.
Jonathan Sacks

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
Arthur M. Schlesinger

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.
Reed Hastings

Quotes on technology shaping – and being shaped by – our perspectives

 
Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.
Sherry Turkle

A satellite has no conscience.
Edward R. Murrow

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.
Steven Pinker

As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action.
Shoshana Zuboff

Technology teaches passivity. Absorbed in our devices – at any age – we are absorbed in someone else’s perspective.
Julia Cameron

Technology is, of course, a double edged sword. Fire can cook our food but also burn us.
Jason Silva

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient… If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Technology is us. There is no separation. It’s a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe. I’m rather sure of that.
David Cronenberg

Quotes on the creation of new ideas in technology

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.
Ray Kurzweil

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley

Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue.
Niels Bohr

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
Marshall McLuhan

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
Carl Sagan

There’s been resistance to every new technology that’s ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn’t stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.
Jeremy Stoppelman

The world changes materially. Science makes advances in technology and understanding. But the world of humanity doesn’t change.
Pierre Schaeffer

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Alfred North Whitehead

The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present.
Glen Hansard

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them.
Douglas Adams

Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau

Technology makes the world a new place.
Shoshana Zuboff

The only constant in the technology industry is change.
Marc Benioff

Quotes on becoming a discerning knower about technology

Turn off your email; turn off your phone; disconnect from the Internet; figure out a way to set limits so you can concentrate when you need to, and disengage when you need to. Technology is a good servant but a bad master.
Gretchen Rubin

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
Clive James

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.
Richard Dawkins

We can’t blame the technology when we make mistakes.
Tim Berners-Lee

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
Mitch Kapor

There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.
Tom Clancy

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language.
Mark Pagel

If you run from technology, it will chase you.
Robert M. Pirsig