Franklin Foer Quotes

I make short films, little documentaries, about the co-evolution of humans and technology.

In some ways, technology keeps on enhancing us, and we embrace it.

The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars; it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.

The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable. Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two.

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.

Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever.

I want to see what technology's going to be like in a few hundred years, if the human race hasn't completely obliterated itself by then.

The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as the work of advanced biology?

We are gods. Our tools make us gods. In symbiosis with our technology, our powers are expanding exponentially and so, too, our possibilities.

If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it's not really obvious where we would be. So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.

In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.

It is innate in our species to be cyborgian in nature. We have been in the self amplifying feedback loop with our tools since stone tools, and since the written word, and what we are seeing now is just a deepening of that. But it has always been the case. We have always done this.

We are the naked monkey that went to the moon. People seem to forget that.

For better or worse, man is the tool-using animal, and as such he has become the lord of creation. When he is lord also of himself, he will deserve his self-chosen title homo sapiens.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

A multidisciplinary study group ... estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.

We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands.

I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

Everything that you are taking advantage of, inventing and using, is still a generation or two behind when it comes to the U.S. government.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.