societal impact of technology Quotes

Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology.

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.

I think we are trying to run the space age with horse and buggy moral and spiritual equipment. Technology you see has no morals; and with no moral restraints man will destroy himself ecologically, militarily, or in some other way. Only God can give a person moral restraints and spiritual strength.

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.

The complicated engines manufactured by men demand, if one really wants to use them, much calm. Ever since our love for machines replaced the love we used to have for our fellow man, catastrophes proceed to increase.

It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.

The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.

Now the tech community is popping up and saying, 'We do need to be involved in our surroundings.'

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.