In the past, I’ve compiled quotes about performance management and about failure. Here are some of my favorite ones about technology:
“But they are useless. They can only give you answers.”
Pablo Picasso, 1964 conversation with William Fifield about computers (source)
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
Roy Amara, researcher and Past president of The Institute for the Future (source)
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic.”
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible (1962)
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”
Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987)
“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”
Sydney J. Harris, Journalist (unverified)
“Today’s science is tomorrow’s technology.”
Edward Teller, The Legacy of Hiroshima (1962)
“Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.”
Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2001)
“For years there has been a theory that millions of monkeys typing at random on millions of typewriters would reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. The Internet has proven this theory to be untrue.”
Anonymous
And one that’s been my favorite since I moved to Silicon Valley 20 years ago:
Once a technology works, it’s already obsolete.
Anyone have any other technology quotes to add?
“Technology is really about people – not hardware or software.”
Bob Wadey, Head of Technology Development, Khemeia Consulting