Alan Kay Quotes

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

I see tech as... a force that is changing pretty much all parts of our society. It's really sad for me that we don't have enough women that are part of that.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Obviously technology has become such a big presence in our lives and, I definitely know, in my life.

I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers.

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

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

What I'm trying to do is to at least raise a flag to the blinding light of technology.

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

We love serious technology innovations, and there is a strong bias towards large technology innovations that are sort of disruptive to the current market.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.

The tech genie is out of the bottle; you can't put it back in.

You can't think of technology as separate from all of our human drama anymore.

We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial.

We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.

It's easy to kind of say it's the elite that's putting you down. Well, it wasn't really the elite, technology will do that.

A lot of the work in United States is highly critical of technology. I'm using 15,000 watts of power and 18 different pieces of electronic equipment to say that.

The problem is that there are very few technologies that essentially haven't changed for 60, 70 years.

I think it's the tragedy of our time that we're not aware of the affect of the manner in which we've adopted tools. Those tools have become who we are.

Even some of the greatest technology-led revolutions, or allegedly technology-led, really were only made possible because of trends already present.

Technology is the fashion of the '90s. It affects everyone, and everyone is interested in it - either from fear of being left behind or because they have a real need to use technology.