David R. Brower Quotes

It's reasonable to say that certain things we understand should perhaps have limits on how they're used and how certain technologies are deployed. That's very much what we should do as a society.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

Limits [to growth] are indeed imposed by the impact of present technologies and social organization on the biosphere, but we must have the ingenuity to change. And change we must.

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.

From the day an idea is conceptualized to the day the technology is built, carried out, and regulated, it's important to have that human awareness.

Each of us has a vital role to play in building a world in which the government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.

The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.

I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.

Consumer technology and medical tools have been created to benefit our daily lives. Without self-regulation, though, the industry could be at risk of potentially halting years of innovation and stunting growth in this field.

Can companies just claim a total lack of political responsibility in how their technology is used in all instances? It's something that companies should be thinking about when they sell their technologies around the world.

Faced with the profound changes that AI technologies can produce, pressure for "more" and "tougher" regulation is inevitable. Misunderstanding about what AI is and is not, especially against a background of scare-mongering, could fuel opposition to technologies that could benefit everyone. This would be a tragic mistake. Regulation that stifles innovation, or relocates it to other jurisdictions, would be similarly counterproductive.

Our technology has already outstripped our ability to control it.

Technologies are political; what technologies finally appear as is not something decided in a laboratory.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

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

I am proud of my invention but I am not happy that it is used by terrorists. I would much rather have invented something for agriculture like a lawnmower.

Those of us concerned with developing new technology should consider ourselves to have a major undertaking to try to meet the expanding needs of the increasing number of people in the world with its finite resources and environments constraints.

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.

We have to take our democracy back. We cannot leave it to Facebook or Snapchat or anyone else. We have to take democracy back and renew it. Society is about people and not about technology.

New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It's all about how people choose to use it.

Technology is amoral, but it requires humanistic values to steer it in a way that's empowering, and not detrimental to social progress. It's up to us to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

In any discussion of technology, you hear the same argument: You can't turn the clock back and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Maybe not. But there are steps we can take to limit the social harm caused by this industry, just like we do with others.

Technology could benefit or hurt people, so the usage of tech is the responsibility of humanity as a whole, not just the discoverer. I am a person before I'm an AI technologist.

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

This [philanthropy] work is even more fascinating. It requires us to think harder about how we build partnerships, who we get behind. And yet we get to see progress that in some ways is even more profound than the great advances that digital technology has provided.