Technology Ethics Quotes

Remember, technology is a great servant, but a terrible master.

The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it.

I like technology, but 'Black Mirror' is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about technology itself: it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it.

Social media, it's a minefield! Technology is moving so fast right now. Everyone is scrambling around trying to understand what it means to have an avatar, how to live our lives on the internet, what it means for privacy, for citizens of a political universe. I think that we're trying to find rules now, as we speak, and it's difficult. But, like everything, the internet is an incredibly powerful force that needs governing - not to restrict our freedom, but to protect people.

Every technology company should have a red button somewhere in the headquarters where, if they realize they've caused more societal harm than they expected and done more harm than good, they press the button, and the company dissolves instantly.

Technology is amoral, but it requires humanistic values to steer it in a way that's empowering, and not detrimental to social progress. It's up to us to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

Every technology that can improve the human condition could harm the human condition. Someone evil could program a robot to hurt people.

A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.

Technology could benefit or hurt people, so the usage of tech is the responsibility of humanity as a whole, not just the discoverer. I am a person before I'm an AI technologist.

As far as what is the line between human and machine? That's a great question.

As we continue to apply AI to new fields, ethical dilemmas will arise and the answers will not be clearly defined.

Technology challenges us to look at our human values. We can try to use technology to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, which would be a blessing, but that blessing is not a reason to move from artificial brain enhancement to artificial intimacy.

We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.

A smartphone is a computer - it's not built using a computer - the job it does is the job of being a computer. So, everything we say about computers, that the software you run should be free - you should insist on that - applies to smart phones just the same. And likewise to those tablets.

The very technologies that empower us to do great good can also be used to undermine us and inflict great harm.

I am scared that if you make the technology work better, you help the NSA misuse it more. I'd be more worried about that than about autonomous killer robots.

When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should?

I felt the violence in 'Upgrade' was necessary because I wanted to show what a computer was capable of.

Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so

Being human in the digital world is about building a digital world for humans.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It's all about how people choose to use it.

One thing is certain: the riddle of mind, long a topic for philosophers, has taken on new urgency. Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians--threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.

Technology is a wonderful tool, but also if used incorrectly a horrible tool. We're fascinated by all aspects of it, whatever makes our human lives easier on the planet, but eventually there will have to be some sort of merger. The fascination isn't going to die down.