Freeman Dyson Quotes

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

We need a science to save us from science.

Technology sometimes gets a bad rap because of certain consequences that it's had on the environment and unforeseen problems, but we shouldn't use it as an excuse to reject our tools; rather, we should decide that we need to make better tools to solve the problems caused by the initial tools in a progressive wave of innovation.

It's reasonable to say that certain things we understand should perhaps have limits on how they're used and how certain technologies are deployed. That's very much what we should do as a society.

Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.

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.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

We talk a lot about building benevolent technology. Our technology reflects our values.

New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It's all about how people choose to use it.

Technology is amoral, but it requires humanistic values to steer it in a way that's empowering, and not detrimental to social progress. It's up to us to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.

Whatever science fiction movies we watch now, we can make the technology real in two days. What we can do is not important. What we should do is more important.

In recent years, we have seen technology advance at lightning speed, allowing us to accomplish lifesaving feats never imagined before. It is our responsibility to ensure that these advances are used for positive medical breakthroughs, and not allowed to restrict rights or limit access to health insurance or job opportunities.

I think that Google has definitely influenced my moral values and the ethics. I think when Larry Page started the company, they weren't in it for the money. They started it because they really wanted to create something that; one, they wanted, and two, they thought was going to change the world.

The whole of technology depends on a scientific background, and of course technology can be used for evil purposes. You can't blame science for that.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

The Six Faces of the future are: Fast, Urban, Tribal, Universal, Radical and Ethical.

When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should?

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.

Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine.

Only science can hope to keep technology in some sort of moral order.

Through the imparting of moral principles, good behaviour, and education we must make the Chandala come up to the level of the Brahmana.

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.

We're in partnership with technology, influencing each other in a dance. My loyalties are to our making and shaping technology to conform to our human values; and to confronting the hard job of figuring out what those values are, and how are we're going to get technology to do that.