Charles Stross Quotes

It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of fight them.

It took me a while to warm up to smartphones. I just reached a point where I was like, 'If I continue to be a luddite, I'm just going to fall so far behind and become really bitter.'

Wireless technology has completely revolutionized information transmission and exchange in India. If you go in the coastal areas, small-scale fishermen who go out in small boats, they now carry a cellphone, which has GPS data on wave heights, where the fish are, et cetera.

However, the agricultural revolution took thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds, and the information revolution only took decades. So, who knows what's going to happen in the next few decades, especially with the women's revolution.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.

Now, with the Internet, you're either five years ahead or you're five years behind, and the music game is catchin' up right now.

I think, actually, that it's a really fascinating time in history because the development of modern technology and the photographs the satellites were taking from space were mapping the earth in a new way, making us feel like the globe we inhabit is much smaller than previously conceived of, in the human mind.

I just think that a much more important part of the problem we face, which was evident 10 years ago and is even more evident now, is that the way we share information among ourselves as American citizens has been radically transformed. The line between news and entertainment has almost dissolved, where ratings now have a big impact on what kinds of stories are covered and not stories.

I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

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

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.

GPS are everywhere. They are in cars. They were even in the half-tracks that, initially at least, were going to make the ground invasion in Kosovo possible.

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

I managed to work for more than 50 years with just paper, pencils and film. My son's generation and the one coming up after can't work with just paper and pencils any more. I managed to avoid using a computer. I don't even have a cellphone. I feel lucky I managed to live like that.

The technology is already incredible and will improve massively in the next few years. Think about what you could do.

Possibly everyone will travel by air in another fifty years. I'm not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky's unbroken solitude. I don't like to think of it cluttered up by aircraft, as roads are cluttered up by cars. I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fence lines encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.

There are so many things happening nowadays that you've seen in films from years ago, like cloning and all of those things are actually happening now, so we can kind of visualize it a lot more, and I think our generation particularly know that we're going to be a big part of that, we we're kind of fascinated with how human beings will fare in the world.

The world used to think we are a land of snake charmers and black magic. But our youth has surprised the world with its IT [information technology] skills. I dream of a digital India.

I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power - the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.

In South Korea, a scientist considered to be one of the pioneers in the field of cloning has been sentenced to two years in prison. At least, they think it's him.

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year.

I don't feel any part of religion. I think the Bible is God's gift of salvation that He gave me because I trusted in Him when I was six year-old. It was a gift and I didn't earn it.