Technological Hubris Quotes

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

There's something so arrogant about us creating robots that are more and more human-looking or acting. It's like we're playing God. Let's create something that's a reflection of us, but it's inferior.

If it were not so frightening it would be amusing to observe the pride and complacency with which we, like children, take apart the watch, pull out the spring and make a toy of it, and are then surprised when the watch stops working.

They build machines they can't control, and bury the waste in a great big hole.

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.

However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

Technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance,... the technologist's worldlessness.... My mistake lay in the factthat we technologists try to live without death.

For folks in Washington to believe that they are smart enough to pick the next energy technology is, in my judgment, the height of arrogance. For me or any of my peers to pick energy-technology X as the solution to solving America's energy problems is just a fool's errand.

Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.

I make no apologies in admitting that I take very seriously the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine, into the image of the techniques by which we study him.

We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!

In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.

'Solutionism' for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection - by means of technology - without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.

We are the greatest computers in this world, but now we've created the smart phone which is smarter than us now, but we're still making dumb decisions. We have given our creations more power than we have, and that to me is dumb.

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!

In addition to their 'do no evil' motto, Googlers have always been guided by another, much less explicit philosophy: 'computational arrogance.'

Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.