Technology Risks Quotes

Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.

Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters.

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.

The dark side of our modern technological age is that more and more killing power is getting into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.

Advances in technology - hugely beneficial though they are - render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander... It's just an extension of humanity.

Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.

Technology is, in many respects, an enabler for an open, transparent society. But it's also an enabler for supervision to a completely unforeseen degree. And for commercialising personal space to an unforeseen degree.

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.

We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.

Technology is constantly improving our lives. Look at the cellular telephone. Just ten years ago, virtually nobody was able to get into a car crash caused by trying to steer and dial at the same time; today, people do this all the time.

We have this yearning to know the answers to the big questions about space and why we're here; we can't evolve fast enough to figure these answers out on our own, but we can do it through artificial intelligence. But there's also some very scary downsides that could come if we don't put the right safety precautions in there.

I'm actually quite pro-technology, but I'm a worrier, so I like to envision worst-case scenarios.

A lot of financial technology is foolhardy. Saying, 'We're going to kill banks. We're going to disrupt everything,' ignores some realities.

It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them, but they are our choices. I think it'd be wrong to think that they're automatically bad.

People try to function in the real world - the analog world - while they're texting in the digital world, and they run into the car in front of them. It doesn't work to be in both.

You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.

I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I'm worried that we might not see that. I'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime. Online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us.

Who benefits from Wi-Fi? We all benefit from Wi-Fi. Is there an industry here? Of course, there is an industry, as well. The point is public health needs protecting. I don't think you should have to prove that there is some profiteer who might have an ulterior motive in order to protect public health.

This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues.

You can fill up your time with anything that you want. And stuff per se is not bad - technology is awesome; if you use it for the right the reason, it's great.

All these gadgets, the phone and the computer, they expose the inside of your brain in a way that's bad.

Let's stick to the practical and the concrete: Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world? If machines were smarter than people? If, in the future, people, animals and plants were products of technology? If you don't like these ideas, then for you the computer and biological sciences clearly are dangerous.

When technological advancement can go up so exponentially, I do think there's a risk of losing sight of the fact that tech should serve humanity, not the other way around.