Technology Quotes - Page 4

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)

Books don't need batteries.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks - at least so far - are fairly limited in their awesomeness.

I might love my e-reader, but I'd never pass up the chance to browse real books.

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.

...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.

We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.

Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes.

It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.

Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.

Anybody that fears and detests witchcraft is not happy with science and technology.

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.

If Paul Revere had been a modern day citizen, he wouldn't have ridden down Main Street. He would have tweeted.

What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the organized workers’ movement and the people is to be achieved again today in West Europe through the “information society

Considering what is at stake politically, economically and technically for most organizations; usually justifying IT governance deployment based on one viewpoint narrows suitability and expected benefits.

No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.

Face it, George – unlike cholera, death is the only disease everyone is guaranteed to get.’

Heath nodded slowly. ‘But usually only once, Hamish. Usually only once.

McAllister looked up into her face, his eyes blazing with anger. At last, his composure cracked.

‘That’s right,’ he shouted back. ‘My word against – whose? Yours? You were dead, remember? No, of course you don’t remember. You were dead!