Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 12 quotes about Technology that I liked and saved from various books. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Technology Quotes from The Coming Wave book by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
- For all its harms, downsides, and unintended consequences, technology’s contribution to date has been overwhelmingly net positive. After all, even technology’s harshest critics are generally happy to use a kettle, take an aspirin, watch TV, and ride on the subway. For every gun there is a dose of lifesaving penicillin; for every scrap of misinformation, a truth is quickly uncovered. And yet somehow, from von Neumann and his peers on, I and many others are anxious about the long-term trajectory. My profound worry is that technology is demonstrating the real possibility to sharply move net negative, that we don’t have answers to arrest this shift, and that we’re locked in with no way out.
- Technology’s unavoidable challenge is that its makers quickly lose control over the path their inventions take once introduced to the world. Technology exists in a complex, dynamic system (the real world), where second-, third-, and nth-order consequences ripple out unpredictably. What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. What people actually do with your invention, however well intentioned, can never be guaranteed.
- Technology has a clear, inevitable trajectory: mass diffusion in great roiling waves. This is true from the earliest flint and bone tools to the latest AI models. As science produces new discoveries, people apply these insights to make cheaper food, better goods, and more efficient transport. Over time demand for the best new products and services grows, driving competition to produce cheaper versions bursting with yet more features. This in turn drives yet more demand for the technologies that create them, and they also become easier and cheaper to use. Costs continue to fall. Capabilities rise. Experiment, repeat, use. Grow, improve, adapt. This is the inescapable evolutionary nature of technology.
- This is the core dilemma: that, sooner or later, a powerful generation of technology leads humanity toward either catastrophic or dystopian outcomes. I believe this is the great meta-problem of the twenty-first century.
- Technology should amplify the best of us, open new pathways for creativity and cooperation, work with the human grain of our lives and most precious relationships. It should make us happier and healthier, the ultimate complement to human endeavor and life well lived – but always on our terms, democratically decided, publicly debated, with benefits widely distributed.
- For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped: the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring it continues to serve us and our planet.
- Technology is now an indispensable mega-system infusing every aspect of daily life, society, and the economy. No one can do without it. Entrenched incentives are in place for more of it, radically more. No one is in full control of what it does or where it goes next. This is not some far-out philosophical concept or extreme determinist scenario or wild-eyed California technocentrism. It is a basic description of the world we all inhabit, indeed the world we have inhabited for quite some time. In this sense it feels like technology is, to use an unforgiving image, one big slime mold slowly rolling toward an inevitable future, with billions of tiny contributions being made by each individual academic or entrepreneur without any coordination or ability to resist. Powerful attractors pull it on. Where blocks appear, gaps open elsewhere, and the whole rolls forward.
- The idea that technology alone can solve social and political problems is a dangerous delusion. But the idea that they can be solved without technology is also wrongheaded.
- Technologically stagnant societies are historically unstable and prone to collapse. Eventually, they lose the capacity to solve problems, to progress.
- Technology is central to how the future will unfold – that’s undoubtedly true – but technology is not the point of the future, or what’s really at stake. We are.
Other Technology Quotes
- The technologies that we have created and adopted are conspiring against us. Perhaps not in the dystopian, attack-of-the-robots manner of our favorite science-fiction thrillers, but in a silent, Trojan Horse manner that is terrifyingly effective. – from The 5 Types of Wealth book by Sahil Bloom
- Modern technology moves so fast that no one can possibly keep up with it all. This includes professors at Harvard, investors in Silicon Valley, and everyone geographically and technically in between. – from How Not to Invest book by Barry Ritholtz