Technological Stagnation Quotes

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

I remember that, one day, I was visiting one training center in the 1990s that was teaching people how to fix Volkswagen engines from the 1960s, which were no longer sold. So you were training people on a skill that had zero value. The reason is that they hadn't received any new equipment in 20 years.

Apart from the seemingly magical Internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953... The wonders portrayed in 'The Jetsons,' the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass... Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down.

Warfare has been marvelously developed. It will soon be impossible to raise it to further heights.

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

The FBI and our entire government has become a bureaucracy. Sick, tired, and old as far as technology is concerned. This has to change.

It's that government bureaucracies crush innovation. We are falling further and further behind in our government.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.

Sometimes, instead of helping people to advance, a discovery or an invention holds them back.

So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in.

My greatest fear is not the abuse of technology but that we will not use it at all.

The joke about SAP has always been, it's making '50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like, it's really - yeah, the incumbency - they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.

It makes me sad when I see things that are just the same technology; you aren't passing the technology forward.

If you stop and think about it, the form of propulsion used today hasn't changed in over a thousand years... since the invention of fireworks by the Chinese.

We are in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, but all the thinking, if you speak to one of those people keen on technology - you see that all their thinking is two centuries old. In cinema, you can show this.

We have all the information in the universe at our fingertips, while our most basic problems go unsolved year after year...All around, we see dazzling technological change, but no progress.

The computer industry is creatively bankrupt.

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.

Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

The cars haven't advanced that much since we were kids. When you boil it down, it's still a gas combustion engine.

Frankly, our technology is not up to date. We're letting it slip by.