Technological Simplicity Quotes

Lighting was very primitive. And still it was really the way to learn because sometimes some of the modern technology is so extreme and so compartmentalized that we lose sight of exactly what we're doing.

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

I have my email on my Blackberry, and that's about it.

Technologically I live in the 17th century. I have a very simple cell phone. I say I live through the kindness of strangers, because if they see something on the Net they type it out and send it to me.

Technologically, I live in the 17th century; I don't have a computer, I don't have any of that stuff. I don't look at the Internet, although I know people tell me I'm all over it. Somebody told me they Googled me, and they said I was mentioned two million times, some stupid thing... but who cares?

My life's goal is to get rid of computers and invent everything that removes its necessity.

The story of technology seems to go up and then retract into simplicity again.

I think I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business and electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers.

Electric light is just another instrument. I have no desire to contrive fantasies mediumistically or sociologically over it or beyond it.

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.