Technological Consequences Quotes

Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish.

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.

The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious — as when a scientist works on nerve gases — he cannot properly claim that such applications are "none of his business," merely on the ground that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill.

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

...A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?

We cannot idealize technology. Technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination, and its uses must be conditioned by our own values.

All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced.

I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. A new technology helps to fuel the economy, and any discussion of slowing its growth has to take account of economic consequences. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology.

If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artist? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happem if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.

Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.

Technology usually provides a series of tradeoffs. Each asset is offset by a deficit...A major problem occurs when those who suffer from technology's defecits and those who benefit are not the same people.

Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment.

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

Any prediction worth its weigh would consider the spiritual, material, and unintended consequences of introducing a new technology to the world. It would proceed from the kind of understanding Chellis articulated: Life is Whole.

One of the things I've come to realize is that, like every new technology and like every disruption, broadband has downsides.

Error-prone or biased artificial-intelligence systems have the potential to taint our social ecosystem in ways that are initially hard to detect, harmful in the long term, and expensive - or even impossible - to reverse.

[The blame for the future 'plight of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships.

There's a great difference between knowing that a thing is so, and knowing how to use that knowledge for the good of mankind. Thetrouble with a scientist is we quickly tire of our discoveries. We hand them over to people who are not ready for them, while we go off again into the darkness of ignorance, searching for other discoveries, which will be mishandled in just the same way when the time comes.

Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization, what sort of consequences that had. Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies. And it took awhile until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and manage and steer this.

It is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away.