Hal Varian Quotes

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you'd be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we're basically headed towards holograms.

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it.

Robotics and other combinations will make the world pretty fantastic compared with today.

In the future, I'm sure there will be a lot more robots in every aspect of life. If you told people in 1985 that in 25 years they would have computers in their kitchen, it would have made no sense to them.

When you look at the actual data on technological innovation, one thing you see is that what I call the 'low-hanging fruit' has been exhausted. So radio, flush toilets, electricity, and automobiles - a lot of very basic inventions - have spread to almost all households.

I don't think love for technology itself breeds change.

For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There's many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly.

The future of society is 100% dependent on scientific advances.

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

We need the next generation to be motivated and to push technological boundaries, to seek out new innovations.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

Patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a word-processor, should not be.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

Innovation - the heart of technological change - is fundamentally a learning process.

Technology is always ahead of the law.

We know that the hardest work is to keep yourself open to the world that technology hasn't tamed.

I'm definitely a techno-optimist. I think we can do amazing things. But in my experience, if a thing has great potential, there is also a risk of great downsides, so to speak. Coming from a truly, really enthusiastic 'wow decade,' we are now moving into waters where we are somewhat more cautious.

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

While global research is crucial, the U.S. must maintain its leadership role as the world's innovator for both medical advancement and job creation.

It would be ridiculous to ignore the speed and possibilities of the digital landscape.

Accelerating technology innovations such as ubiquitous sensors, cheap computing power, and 5G networks will open entirely new opportunities and challenges.

Every time there is a major shift in technology, it's been hugely exciting and scary at the same time. I have seen some really drastic changes in technology, like shooting only film to video to digital.