Silas Bent Quotes

• Technology and the machine resurrected San Francisco while Pompeii still slept in her ashes.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
• Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
• Technology is a sprinter, the Law is a marathon runner.
• A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
• The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
• For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
• The general precept of any product is that simple things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.
• Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
• I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
• I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!
• I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.
• If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
• I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.
• In the future, airplanes will be flown by a dog and a pilot. And the dog's job will be to make sure that if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons, the dog bites him.
• It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
• The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.
• The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
• The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
• Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
• Technology can do little for people who have nothing to say.
• Technology:is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
• Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
• This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
• Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.
• We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
• We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
• We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
• Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

silas bent