Tyler Cowen Quotes

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

Technology has become our culture

Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations.

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations.

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.

The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad, are a continuing inescapable embarrassment to science fiction, and an object lesson in the fallibility of genre writers and their vaunted predictive abilities.

The social and economic impact of innovative American researchers, companies, and workers over the course of U.S. history have been enormous.

Patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a word-processor, should not be.

In a world being transformed by technology, good science is vital to good diplomacy.

A full-fledged nanotechnology will disrupt all kinds of social and economic processes. Yet there is no reason to believe that humanity will be unable to cope with what is coming.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.

We know that the hardest work is to keep yourself open to the world that technology hasn't tamed.

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

The mechanical loom and the calculator have shown us that technology is both disruptive and filled with opportunities. But it would be hard to find a decent argument that we would have been better off without these inventions.

In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

A major one which no one can overlook is technological and based on inventions and discoveries which have altered the whole basis of production and deeply affected social relations.

The problem is that there are very few technologies that essentially haven't changed for 60, 70 years.