Joshua Foer Quotes

While most of the world's information is beginning to be stored electronically, most of the world's expertise still resides in books.

As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species - that means all known and recorded information - is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years.

The core of what Google is about is bringing information to people.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

A library is thought in cold storage.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

We use paper documents to store knowledge so we can consult and reconsult it, giving us a type of recall impossible with our unaided minds; we use pencils to scratch down material so we can manipulate it in a fashion impossible in our unaided minds.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things.

Computers have wonderful memories. Human memory is more fuzzy.

I've been, like, the mom of Google.

We're saved somewhat by Google. You can - when you're all sitting around the table desperately snapping your fingers in the hopes of remembering the name of that movie that you can't remember the name of - you can make people think that you are not as old as you actually are because you have the technology to find the answer.

Someone sent me an article on AI that was written by Tim Urban on the website Wait but Why - that was kind of where I stuck my toes in the puddle, and I said, 'OK, I've gotta learn about this!' I felt like this is one of those things that our generation is going to have to answer for, eventually, and I just wanted to educate myself on it.

Memory has always been social. Now we're using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.

Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

It's great that the Internet can enhance and speed up our communications and that computers can do all the things they do. It's fabulous. At the same time, it changes our priorities. For example, before I would always remember people's telephone numbers and now I don't know anyone's number. So what happens if computer systems go down but you still have landlines? Well, I couldn't call anyone because I don't know anyone's number.

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.

A prince without letters is a Pilot without eyes. All his government is groping.

If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do.

A BOOK?! WHAT D'YOU WANNA FLAMING BOOK FOR?...WE'VE GOT A LOVELY TELLY WITH A 12-INCH SCREEN AND NOW YA WANNA BOOK!

Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent... the camera.

So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.