Amory Lovins Quotes

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.

I keep thinking I should get a phone, because everyone's got one and it becomes increasingly difficult to exist in a society where everyone else has moved ahead and you haven't.

If you're holding your iPhone, and it's the newest iteration of it, you're like, 'Oh, famous people have my phone. Captains of industry have my phone.' And that can be an intoxicating experience for someone who is going off to college for the first time.

I'm ambivalent about tech.

Technology is only meaningful when it reaches the people.

I believe technology will continue to become more affordable and more people will have the chance to use it. This will help more people get medical care and a good education.

People need to understand that the technology is for them. It's not to them. It's not over them. People still sometimes want to be led a little too much.

If you look at the banking business over many years, it's always been a huge user of technology. This has been going on my whole life, that people have been adding technology, digitizing services.

The qualities which technique requires for its advance are precisely those characteristics of a technical order which do not represent indivisual intelligence...The individual, in order to make use of technical instruments, no longer needs to know about his civilization.

I think it's very easy for people who are not deep in the technology itself to make generalizations, which may be a little dangerous. And we've certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it's going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

By and large, people are sort of technologically averse in the political space.

Technology changing the world so quickly. I think it's even more difficult for older people to keep up in the world. And that's a challenge.

I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

You can overcome wrong technology. Your people have the initiative, they see the problem, no big deal ... you can't overcome bad culture. You've gotta change whoever is in charge.

One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.

Technology is incredibly creative and has great potentials; but it is also very seductive in the way it isolates people, in the way it jazzes people up, in the way it makes junkies out of us - junkies who need a constant stimulation, more information, more bells and whistles, more electronic wonders in order not to be bored.

I'm twice as funny, I'm twice as smart, I'm twice as whatever when I'm around other people that challenge me.

Well you know I've been in that place too where you worry about what everybody thinks of you, am I popular, do people care, are they looking at me, all that stuff. That's a drag, man. Having to worry about fitting in, am I cool enough to ANYTHING.

The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.