Terence McKenna Quotes

If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate me. Let's get the dialogue going.

I don't think enough people have accepted that the machines have already taken over. They are patiently waiting for us to catch up with them. Our world is now interdependent with the machines, and more entrepreneurs should be working on the symbiosis between the two entities.

If I didn't travel so much, maybe my perfect Sunday would be skin diving on a coral reef - not scuba diving, as skin diving is more physical, and I prefer the lightness of it. Skin diving means wearing just goggles. Oh, I could wear some trunks, maybe.

Technology has become such a big part of our humanity. We have the Internet on 24 hours a day, even when we're sleeping.

With the advent of technology the world has surely become a smaller place.

I understand that space travel and expansion is just as much about altering ourselves, our attitudes, our social structures, our very biology, as it is about altering the places we choose to live.

There's just always going to be both positives and negatives to any evolution that we're a part of. And there's really no stopping the evolution of technology. There has been more and more integration in our daily lives, so we become more and more dependent on it.

I'm so tired of cyberpunk that says using machines to make your life better makes you less human.

I'm obsessed with great white sharks. And I want to dive into the coral of the Great Barrier Reef.

Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

I'm not anti-technology at all, really.

I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I... can just call them up instantly. And that's great. But what's happening right now is that we're in a phase of human evolution where we're merging with machines.

History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player, or now the Net.

You can't think of technology as separate from all of our human drama anymore.

Convergence of technology is important. One people, one mission, one nation, this will be possible then.

Instead of using technology or wearing technology constantly, we will start becoming technology.

I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

This is a slow business to have success in. There are exceptions, but for the most part it's kind of like the last writer standing.... I've got gray. I've got plenty of gray. I'm creating a career slowly, like a coral reef.

To me, what you want to do is find a way to let this play out between the virtual world and the physical world...Ultimately, I think society will get there. It will be messy, but we'll get there.

The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.

‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.

We're beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and more efficient.

I'm going to create a - the kind of a country that we were from the standpoint of industry. We used to be there. We've given it up. We've become very, very sloppy.

Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization, what sort of consequences that had. Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies. And it took awhile until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and manage and steer this.