J. C. R. Licklider Quotes

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

Email is the lowest common denominator. It's the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn't really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you're sending a message to a human you don't know well, you're using email.

We are in an age of technology where we sit in our little cubicles and we IM each other and Skype each other and never connect as human beings.

Because of technology, we don't develop telepathy. We don't use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why?

While the digital age has done so much to improve our world, it has dramatically changed our social structure, often further isolating us from each other.

I am a member of the human race. There's a certain irony about the cyberworld. You don't know who is talking to you, if it's a machine, so I tend to try to reach out to those fellow humans.

Where humanity is going to find itself in, say, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years would be very difficult to predict, I think. There are moments, of course, when you think that it's going from bad to worse, but there are other moments when you think that human efforts are really flowering into something really fantastic.

Saudi Arabia has also changed. People today are connecting with each other all across the world through small gadgets and television. It's a different society.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

Television is the triumph of machine over people.

Once you have extrapolated the effects a particular science will have on society - cheap clean energy, rejuvenation - the political impact is quite easy to predict. The two are twinned.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

So technologies, whether it is a telephone or an iPhone, computers in general or automobiles, television even, all individualize us. We all sit in front of our iPhones and communicating but are we really communicating?

In the end, perhaps it will be the true romantics, not the nerds, who choose to flee from a world of impersonal, digitized relationships and into the arms of simulacrums with manners imported from simpler times.

Technology will move faster than governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences.

… the telephone was only a convenience permitting Americans to do more orally and with less effort than what they had been doing before.

We didn't need the Internet for Nazi Germany to happen. But I feel like there's this lack of humanity because of it.

Technology is changing the way we interact as humans.

Indeed, though people increasingly learn and interact online, we retain a fundamental need to engage in person.

I am a great enthusiast and early adopter of technology, but sometimes I wonder whether the inexorable integration of technology in our lives could diminish some of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation.

I'm fascinated by the idea that a human connection can be triggered through inanimate devices.