Vaclav Smil Quotes

Techno-optimism is a belief in the power of technology to extend our sphere of possibilities and, ultimately, a belief that technology helps us solve and transcend problems, limitations and obstacles.

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

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

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.

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.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

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

I truly hope that we can evolve with technology, and use it for the benefit of all mankind, but history might suggest otherwise.

I think, when I wrote 'Children of Jihad,' I wrote it with a very optimistic view of what technology can do. Today I maintain that optimistic view, but I'm also aware of the challenges we have. So I would say I'm not a techno-utopian, but I'm a techno-pragmatist.

I used to have the very standard worldview. I can easily identify with people who see computers getting faster and smarter, and technology getting more and more beneficial, without seeing the other side.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

Technology is not destiny.

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

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.

I am not a Luddite. I am suspicious of technology. I am perfectly aware of its benefits, but I also try to pay attention to some of the negative effects.

I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made.

It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.

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

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

Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.

The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad, are a continuing inescapable embarrassment to science fiction, and an object lesson in the fallibility of genre writers and their vaunted predictive abilities.