9 Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Technology

Buckminster Fuller quotes on technology

8. It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as 'matter,' find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science. (1947)

21. Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate 'comprehensivlty.' Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.

34. You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer.

35. While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing.

71. I do not look upon human beings as good or bad. I don't think of my feet as a right foot and a wrong foot. ... I am a student of the effectiveness of the technological evolution in its all unexpected alterations of the preoccupations of humanity and in its all unexpected alterings of human behaviors and prospects.

72. I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.

84. I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

97. There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings - and all the people sleeping in the slums.

98. Up to the twentieth century, 'reality' was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum ... humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.