We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Smartphones are tools which fools fiddle with when they are around people that they don’t have the courage, or, the intellect, to converse with.

You can’t argue with facts. You’re not entitled to your own facts.

If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.

That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a...

He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And them Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as...

The World’s Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world...

E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.

[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from...

Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize ‘ideologies,’ desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the...

Never in mankind’s history have we so fundamentally changed our means of existence with so little thought.

It wasn’t science and technology that cause a slow progress, but collective knowledge of the society and market demands.

Technology is the idol of our age. The Bible describes the evils of worshipping things built by the hand of man. Back then, it was a simple statue, today it is far more insidious. And...

Here we introduce the nation’s first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history’s first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union’s man was one Rutherford B....

Amazin’.’ he said again. ‘He just looks as though he’s thinking, right?”Er…yes.”But he’s not actually thinking?”Er…no.”So…he just gives the impression of thinking but really it’s just a show?”Er…yes.’Just like everyone else, then really,’ said Ridcully

Apple is more about innovative branding than technology. It is fast, fresh and fleshy and will not stale so easily.

We realised after seeing Poseidon that CCTV technology is designed to revisit an incident that you have recorded, not to alert you to an incident,

Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by...

In this section you will learn how to use the tools the way that I think you will choose to use them by default.

I believe there no surer path to leaping dramatically forward in your career than to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities. Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully,...

She doesn’t recognize the number—none of her friends use their phones as phones anymore.

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the...

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought...

I’ve never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on...

Technology innovation for the sake of innovation is an empty shell if we focus on what people don’t need but would buy anyways.

I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology...

A citizen at his home in Rockford, Illinois, or Boulder, Colorado, could read a newspaper, listen to a radio, or watch the round-the-clock coverage on television, but he had no way of connecting with those...

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

It looks like the technology stocks are recovering, so that’s helping the market tone.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner...

My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.

If privacy had a gravestone it might read: ‘Don’t Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.

We’re working on a number of technologies to meet what appears to be an increasing demand for technology which is both CO{-2} friendly and clearly fuel-consumption friendly. We’re looking at diesel engines, we’re looking at...

There had never been a Class A1 event; it had always been a purely theoretical designation. Until now.

if it works it’s obsolete

When you write by hand, you don’t have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, “Is this necessary at...

As we watch, in fascination, the arresting replicas of reality on our television screen, there may sit, in the same room, a telephone and a phonograph. On our bedside table stands a radio; another accompanies...

By 1833 the largest publisher in America, Harper and Company, boasted one horse-powered printing press and seven hand presses while the American Bible Society owned 16 new state-of-the-art, steam-driven presses and 20 hand presses.

I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast,...

Magic–that’s just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn’t so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.

This downtrend in technology stocks is looking more serious than we had expected,

Database Management System [Origin: Data + Latin basus “low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, ounterfeit.”] A complex set of interrelational data structures allowing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete record...

There’s a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. That’s true of all types of consumer electronics.

America’s technology has turned in upon itself; its corporate form makes it the servant of profits, not the servant of human needs

Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the...

Any ceremony performed in the absence of reasonable knowledge as to cause and effect is magic.

Civic participants don’t aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate…

I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not...

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won’t create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the...