Prince Charles Quotes

We are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at controlling them.

The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control

Men have become the tools of their tools.

The liberating force of scientific knowledge is objectively expressed in the great achievements of technology. Whoever possesses technology has power of the earth and men. As a result of this, hitherto unknown forms of inequality have arisen between those who possess knowledge and those who are simple users of technology.

Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule.

if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. ... This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control…

Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

Of course, technology is not an exogenous force over which humans have no control. We are not constrained by a binary choice between acceptance and rejection. Rather, the decisions we make every day as citizens, consumers, and investors guide technological progress.

Once we have something that is no longer under control, once technological development is yanked out of our hands, it doesn't have to continue to be beneficial to humans.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

We've seen the power of the PC, and we've seen that it's unstoppable.

Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.

Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.

... as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world.

We do not ride upon the railroad. It rides upon us.

If we grab technology and adapt it and make it work for us, it will work in one way, whereas if we just leave it, it will stay in the hands of big corporations and governments, who have other agendas.

This Metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be a god on Earth.

Imagine a world where Apple, Google, and Intel were Chinese companies. It would be scary.

A lot of people need technology to survive. And if you're renting it and you don't own it or have control over it, you're at the mercy of whoever does.

The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.

The belief that the law will never 'catch up' to technology is borne in part of tech exceptionalism, a libertarian elitism that derides any kind of legal or regulatory impediment as Luddism.

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.