Bill McKibben Quotes

We wring our hands over the miscarriages of technology and take its benefactions for granted

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

I truly hope that we can evolve with technology, and use it for the benefit of all mankind, but history might suggest otherwise.

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 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.

You can't stop technology or science, and it is snowballing quicker than ever. Something's got to come to a head. How? Who knows? But it will.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Technology is not destiny.

I have very complex and complicated ideas about technology. It's such a prominent way that we communicate with each other. In ways, I think it's really positive, and in ways, I think it's really negative.

I am totally anti-technology.

Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.

If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.

I think it's amazing when technology is used in a smart way, but the responsibility that comes with it... I think there's a lot of technology that we're using that we haven't thought through. It's a bit scary to put all your trust in technology and to think that that's what going to save us. We're going to have to make some compromises.

The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.

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.

We were promised a simpler life, and technology has only complicated our lives.

We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

The virtual world is not the enemy. The pioneers invented a world they believed in, but the followers must follow that world whether they believe in it or not.

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

Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.

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