George Packer Quotes

I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.

It makes me sad when I see things that are just the same technology; you aren't passing the technology forward.

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.

It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

One hundred years ago, people were faced with the choice of learning to read or remaining illiterate laborers who would be left behind as have-nots in a rapidly modernizing world. In the coming century, being able to command a world that will be thoroughly computerized will set apart those who can live successfully in the future from those who will be utterly left behind.

Technology changes nothing.

Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation.

Technology is always evolving, and companies.. not just search companies.. can't be afraid to take advantage of change.

The greatest evils of society are goods that have refused to go on, but have sat down on the highway, saying to the world, "We stop here; do you stop also.

Technology will have moved on to an unimaginable level in ten years.

People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.

We've invented most of the stuff that we need and now we're just messing about

Changes that used to take place in 50 years now happen in a handful of years . . . or even months. And how we deal with that changing technology explains almost everything.

We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue, our future is in space.

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

A lot of the people in history who I really admire lived before the hyperinformation age we're living in. Even if they were governing or solving problems in consequential periods, like the Civil War or the world wars or the Great Depression or the Cold War, they had a period of time and space to actually think, to be private and you read their biographies, and they had time to think about what was happening and how to respond. I don't think human nature has changed in the last 50-150 years, but the stresses, the demands on those of us in public life have just exploded.

I am super lucky. I've been in the area where things have been changing and been part of the digital revolution, the magic of software, the internet, the computer, and now the cellphone... so it's been a great privilege.

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

The globe is shrinking, the information age is bringing a lot of changes. People are anxious about their future and their children's futures.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move.

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.