Technological Failure Quotes

I've had many failures in terms of technological... business... and even research failures. I really believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing.

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist

There is a race between mankind and the universe. Mankind is trying to build bigger, better, faster, and more foolproof machines. The universe is trying to build bigger, better, and faster fools. So far the universe is winning.

My fear, is that we are becoming so dependent on technology that if it was all taken away for some reason, some big incident, that we are losing our ability to function without it.

In public, an admission of technological inadequacy would be too embarrassing.

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.

I didn't view my body as broken, I reasoned that a human being can never be broken. Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate.

Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.

We can't blame the technology when we make mistakes.

When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are.

People say, 'You're old.' Old ain't nothing. You've got new cars that break down and old cars that pass them.

Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.

The last thing we'll hear is some scientist saying 'It works!'

Hello! Your dear father is unfortunately very dead," he called. "And you said my dispersal system would never work!

The first video I ever watched was on a Beta system because everyone thought Beta was the way but then it ended up being video so we backed the wrong horse.

Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something - I think they just didn't know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.

The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.

In the 'Revelation Space' books, the spaceships are a bit old and rusty, and things go wrong, and they don't work quite how they're meant to. And people asked why I did it this way, and groping around for an explanation, I said that I grew up in Barry, this post-industrial sea town full of rusting infrastructure.

I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy.

Technology isn't fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.

Augmented reality is the 'boy who cried wolf' of the post-Internet world - it's long been promised but has rarely been delivered in a satisfying way.

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.