Erik Brynjolfsson Quotes

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

The technological revolution has the potential to liberate us or enslave us, and the road we take will depend on our politics.

I used to have the very standard worldview. I can easily identify with people who see computers getting faster and smarter, and technology getting more and more beneficial, without seeing the other side.

Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

The great growling engine of change - technology.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

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.

What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.

It would be incredibly presumptuous and self-serving of me to believe that Facebook was the end of history. The only way it could possibly be the end of history is if it becomes some sort of artificial super intelligence that takes over the world.

Television is the triumph of machine over people.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made.

It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.

In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?

Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.

Technological advances have brought our nation to a point where momentous public choices are inescapable.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish.

The computer of today is really in its infancy.

if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. ... This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control…