Philosophy Of Technology Quotes & Sayings

The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it. — Linus Torvalds

One connection I see between the work I did on philosophy and my work on technology is that both communities tend to mystify and create an atmosphere of complexity. — Astra Taylor

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience ...
If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.
Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.
Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real. — Jaron Lanier

And of course the reason the Enlightenment has taught us to trash our own history, to say that Christianity is part of the problem, is that it has had a rival eschatology to promote. It couldn't allow Christianity to claim that world history turned its great corner when Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again, because it wanted to claim that world history turned its great corner in Europe in the eighteenth century. "All that went before," it says, "is superstition and mumbo-jumbo. We have now seen the great light, and our modern science, technology, philosophy, and politics have ushered in the new order of the ages." That — N. T. Wright

Philosophy began when man ate the produce of the earth and suffered indigestion. — Khalil Gibran

Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life. — Miguel De Unamuno

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history. — Jacques Barzun

Markets are not just about the steam engine, iron foundries, or today's silicon-chip factories. Markets also supported Shakespeare, Haydn, and the modern book superstore. The rise of oil painting, classical music, and print culture were all part of the same broad social and economic developments, namely the rise of capitalism, modern technology, rule of law, and consumer society. — Tyler Cowen

Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs. — Robert Anton Wilson

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? — Barry Lopez

To gain control over a large number of people you do not have to place them in containers with suction caps attached to their bodies like in the film "The Matrix". It is enough to create an all-encompassing information network because then people will automatically take their places in its cells. — Vadim Zeland

The lion's share of the problems that really bother us don't call for additional technology, theory, philosophy, or data (we're up to our necks in that); instead, the problems call for the ability to change what people do. And when it comes to this particular skill, demand far exceeds supply. Given — Kerry Patterson

On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.
On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
Values are subjective
but sexism and racism are really evil.
Technology is bad and destructive
and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.
Tolerance is good and dominance is bad
but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows. — Stephen Hicks

Someday, it will be hard to remember why we were once so fired up about 3G connectivity and the wonders of mobile broadband. Seamless, lightning-fast connectedness will be a given everywhere on Earth, and today's gadgets will be quaint museum pieces. At that point, all we'll care about is what kind of life these devices have created for us. And if it isn't a good life, we'll wonder what we did wrong. — William Powers

A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them - to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom. — Theodore Sturgeon

Perhaps the strangest manifestation of the Eurocentric approach to the history of military technology is ... the attempt to discern fundamental cultural roots in the distant past that have resulted in the perceived current Western dominance of the world. This essentialism attempts to contrast ancient Greek logic and philosophy with the less rationally minded philosophies of the non-West. Modern science and technology, in this view, is a simple jump from ancient Greece to early modern Europe. — Peter A. Lorge

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself. — Neil Postman

Although technology often leads science in discovery, the philosophy of technology is usually drawn from the scientific philosophy of its time. In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has drawn upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units, and taking averages. — Gerald M. Weinberg

We can't even resist making antimatter, so what makes you think we are going to leave cloning technology untapped? (Douglas Parsley) — Alan Chains

Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost. — David Cronenberg

This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo - our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East - in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. — Alan W. Watts

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. — Joseph Campbell

The catchall phrase big data means three things. First, it is a bundle of technologies. Second, it is a potential revolution in measurement. And third, it is a point of view, or philosophy, about how decisions will be-and perhaps should be-made in the future — Steve Lohr

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years. — Stefan Molyneux

On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "A realm of intimate, personal power is developing- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog. — Walter Isaacson

Dale's face is older. Just a little. Around the eyes and mouth. The skin of his neck. The back of his hands. Maybe not, he thinks, turning on the faucet, letting the water grow warm then hot.
He begins shaving his lubricated chin and cheeks. Chrysalis hibernation slows things down, but it doesn't stop them, not all together, and he finds himself to currently resemble something between a derelict and a college student, neither one ringing particularly desirable in his present mood. — David Edward Wagner

My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life. — Bernard Stiegler

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. — Jean Baudrillard

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. — Marshall McLuhan

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology. — Richard C. Lewontin

The issues involved are sufficiently important that courses are now moving out of the philosophy departments and into mainstream computer science. And they affect everyone. Many of the students attracted to these courses are not technology majors, and many of the topics we discuss relate to ethical challenges that transcend the computer world. — D. Michael Quinn

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy. — Brian Greene

I'm not against the concept of Creators/God, I'm against the antiquated beliefs that there are evil things, which are merely axioms we concocted out of our inadequacy as mortal beings, primitive brain, and underdeveloped technology. — Andreas Laurencius

Corporate philosophy: ideas that reach beyond the imaginable, technology that crosses the bounds of possibilities, and entrepreneurship that surpasses the expected — Anonymous

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event. — David Pearce

The solutions put forth by imperialism are the quintessence of simplicity ... When they speak of the problems of population and birth, they are in no way moved by concepts related to the interests of the family or of society ... Just when science and technology are making incredible advances in all fields, they resort to technology to suppress revolutions and ask the help of science to prevent population growth. In short, the peoples are not to make revolutions, and women are not to give birth. This sums up the philosophy of imperialism. — Fidel Castro

But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant "art." The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them. — Robert M. Pirsig

Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. — Neil Postman

Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be recast in new forms again and again. At present we are living in an era when many of the basic tenents of Christianity, which has supported Western spiritual values for almost two thousand yearsm have come into conflict with the conclusions of science and philosophy. While religions have lost much of their power, science and technology have not been able to generate convincing value systems to replace them. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Violence is the gold standard, the reserve that guarantees order. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. Violence transcends the quirks of philosophy, religion, technology, and culture. () It's time to quit worrying and learn to love the battle axe. History teaches us that if we don't, someone else will. — Jack Donovan

The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult. — Adam Nevill

A good description of photography necessitates that one treat it as an essence unto itself; not as an event either of the World or of philosophy, or as a syncretic sub-product of modern science and technology; that one recognize the existence, not just of a photographic art, but of an authentic photographic thought; the existence, beyond the components of technology and image production, of a certain specific relation to the real, one which knows itself as such. — Francois Laruelle

My expectations from the university were perhaps too idealistic. I had dreams of learning things about innovation and discovery in the field of technology, but all of it hit the ground hard, when I faced with the pathetic reality of the so-called higher education system. To my surprise, I found myself stuck behind the walls of meaningless facts, figures and rankings. It occurred to me that, it was not actually a place for education, rather it was a place where you go to get your head filled with useless undigested information, that you'd probably never use throughout your entire life. It was not education, and moreover, it was definitely not science. — Abhijit Naskar