#techno

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected. ↗

— John McKinley

#business model #doing #essential #essential thing #expected

Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production. ↗

— Ralph Merkle

#agriculture #amount #because #certain #could

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#any #being #day #human #human being

I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up. ↗

— Dan Millman

#almost #creature #earth #i #i see

Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. ↗

— Rupert Murdoch

#everywhere #proved #regimes #technology #telecommunications

Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose. ↗

— Andy Rooney

#america #computer #copies #duplicate #even

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. ↗

— B. F. Skinner

#machines #men #problem #real #real problem

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#identity #leisure #technology #work #art

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#consumer-culture #end-of-the-word #feudalism #technology #age

[...] there is one inexorable law of technology, and it is this: when revolutionary inventions become widely accessible, they cease to be accessible. Technology is inherently democratic, because it promises the same services to all; but it works only if the rich are alone using it. When the poor also adopt technology, it stops working. A train used to take two hours to go from A to B; then the motor car arrived, which could cover the same distance in one hour. For this reason cars were very expensive. But as soon as the masses could afford to buy them, the roads became jammed, and the trains started to move faster. Consider how absurd it is for the authorities constantly to urge people to use public transport, in the age of the automobile; but with public transport, by consenting not to belong to the elite, you get where you're going before members of the elite do. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#inventions #technology #transport #age