Jack Kilby Quotes

The high-tech business, the semiconductor business, it's very competitive. You're out there every day slugging it out, no different from players slugging it out on the ice.

In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.

If you were a kid in 1955, you would pick up a copy of 'Popular Science' and it would say, 'This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours,' or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

This [Asia, Australia & New Zealand] is going to be the world't largest market. If we're not there setting the rules, then somebody else is.

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.

In the economic competition, in the technological competition, we are competitors; we are not allies.

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

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

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.

In terms of building consumer products, the U.S. and China are ahead of India. The interesting opportunity for India is whenever there is a disruption in technology, it gives every country a chance to leapfrog and take a lead. To take an example, China is leaping ahead in growing the China electric vehicle ecosystem.

When my grandfather was born, there was no healthcare. There were no airplanes. There were no boats. There were no trains. There were no communications. No Internet. No widespread knowledge. It will be a completely different world but a much better place in a hundred years.

With tech companies, whoever's the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, 'Is this the end of them?' And - there's more - more times people think that's the case than it really is the case.

I don't think the West needs to apologize - or pay - for having invented the steam engine.

Our lives and our culture have been significantly changed and improved by hardware, software, and services developed by immigrants.

My obsession is with technology and how it can improve human life. In my view, what we have seen in the last 300 years is only a trailer.

Scotland almost invented the modern world. I mean, all of these televisions, telephones, penicillin, we all - all of these things were invented in Scotland.

Throughout the history of communications, we've seen that the country that sets the pace in rolling out each new generation of wireless technology gains an economic edge.

As we consider the implications of AI, there is a bright future ahead for countries that invest and participate.

For a country like ours that needs to stay ahead of the world or go under, we must do great, ambitious things - like going to the moon - to survive.

We have seen things in the twentieth century like the ATM machine, the VCR, and even the car. The electric car was invented in 1920, and here we, 100 years later, it is only now becoming an actual thing. So it doesn't surprise me that new ideas are met with a lot of questions.

Our successes have been so great and so rapid that, within 20 years, we've gotten a third of the world's population online, shrunk our computers to the size of our hands, and connected each to each.

Are machines getting more and more powerful? Absolutely. It's been going on since 1940. We are making progress, and for many people, it will be a lifesaver.

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.

The U.S. has always been a global innovation vanguard - driving advancements in computing, communication, and media to rail, automobiles, and aeronautics.