David Harvey Quotes

I had one typewriter for 50 years, but I have bought seven computers in six years. I suppose that's why Bill Gates is rich, and Underwood is out of business.

Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

It's Moore's Law, everything will be obsolete in 10 years - I'll be obsolete in 10 years!

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

I remember when cable happened and everyone said broadcast was dead, and then satellite happened and everyone said cable was dead, and then DVDs happened and everyone said everything was over. Nothing was over. I'm very optimistic about the future.

We live in a cult of the upgrade right now. There's always something around the corner that will make whatever you think is cool right now feel obsolete.

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

No particular technology lasts for long.

People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it's not going to make that much of a difference.

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

Weird how fast technology changes.

Policy doesn't move as quickly as innovation happens.

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s Technology

Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.

The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.

With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.

The correct rate of speed in innovating changes in long-standing social customs has not yet been determined by even the most expert of the experts. Personally I am beginning to think there is more danger in lagging than in speeding up cultural change to keep pace with mechanical change.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago. I was still using a typewriter until 2002.

How unhappy are you that your dishwasher has replaced washing dishes by hand, your washing machine has displaced washing clothes by hand or your vacuum cleaner has replaced hand cleaning? My guess is this ‘job displacement’ has been very welcome, as will the ‘job displacement’ that will occur over the next 10 years. This is a good thing. Everyone wants more jobs and less work.

What keeps me up late at night, in the sense of worry, I guess it's innovation. It's funny to be worried about it, because it's a fair point that wow, look at the innovation we've seen over the past, not just 30 years, but over the past two years.

Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.

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

Software was changing so fast, so unbelievable, that that got very quick adoption.