Technology

The 2001 data vividly demonstrates a trend that began about seven years ago -- namely that the high-tech industry is increasingly dominated by the software sector in terms of jobs and innovations. Software industry innovation now permeates all other high-tech sectors, including hardware design and manufacturing. Since 1995, manufacturing jobs have increased by 46,000, while software and computer services jobs have increased by 1.2 million.
~ William T. Archey, in AeA Press Release (26 June 2002). Growth of Tech Employment Declines Sharply in 2001, AeA Report Says

We are seeing more and more state-level rules and regulations with dramatic impact on high-tech business. The technology industry simply can't afford to not get involved. ... The high-tech industry by nature does not stay confined to state boundaries and regulatory jurisdictions -- think of the Internet and satellite communications. Therefore, our industry is uniquely harmed by a states-produced patchwork of laws governing its use.
~ William T. Archey, in AeA Press Release (18 July 2002). Tech Industry to Focus on Growing Influence of State Legislatures, Procurement Opportunities

The Web is giving the Pentagon severe heartburn these days, not just because of hackers and bogeyman cyber-terrorists, but because of the very nature of the medium: it is borderless and anarchic. As one military Webmaster puts it, some in uniform have been slow in realizing that World Wide Web actually means worldwide web.
~ William M. Arkin, Special to washingtonpost.com, "Dot.Mil" (1998). Warring on the Web

Those newshounds love the Web because of its ability to deliver information not just from one local paper or a few broadcast networks. The Internet opens up access to countless domestic and foreign sources, but most important, with the growing investment by governments and militaries online, it also provides the option for the normal citizen to forgo the media filter and get information straight from the primary source.
~ William M. Arkin, Special to washingtonpost.com, "Dot.Mil" (1998). Losing the Information War With Iraq

Building a capacity for advanced technology is not like planning production in a socialist economy, but more like growing a rock garden. Planting, watering, and weeding are more appropriate than five-year plans.
~ William ("W.") Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What it Is and How it Evolves (2009). Chapter 8. Revolutions and Redomainings

I'm an enthusiast about technology, but I am also suspicious of it and what it's doing to us. It intrudes in our lives, it causes us problems such as climate change, and it's taken away a lot of our deep connection with nature. But at the same time it's an incredible wonder.
~ William ("W.") Brian Arthur, Interview in American Scientist (August 2009).

What is important is that complex systems, richly cross-connected internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be goal-seeking in complex patterns.
~ William (W.) Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956). Part One: Mechanism. 4: The Machine With Input

Probably for better, but conceivably for worse, virtual worlds are creating a very new context in which young people are socialized to group norms, learn intellectual skills, and express their individuality.
~ William Sims Bainbridge, in Science Magazine 317: 472-476 (27 July 2007). The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds

Whoever controls access to digital information also controls access to consumers.
~ Willms Buhse, Reuters (20 March 2006).

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?
~ "Johnny" William Carson, NBC TV. The Tonight Show

Uncontrolled technology can certainly bring down disaster, perhaps irreparable, on our race. The only protection against it is a growth in man's spiritual and moral maturity proportionate to his growth in technical skill and power.
~ W. Norris Clarke, in America (26 September 1959).

Technology has miniaturized the globe, reducing vast oceans to mere ponds. Distant countries are now almost neighbors as our bodies travel faster than the speed of sound and our voices at the speed of light. ... Today the world is not much bigger than a ball spinning on the finger of science.
~ William S. Cohen, Remarks at U.S. Air Force Academy Graduation, Colorado Springs, CO (28 May 1997).

Technology is miniaturizing the globe, binding our destiny ever more closely to that of our allies and economic partners around the world.
~ William S. Cohen, Statement to the Senate Armed Service Committee (22 January 1997).

We are trying to take it step by step because it's very, very difficult technology we are trying.
~ William S. Cohen

This was, science-wise, a significant accomplishment. ... It's movable, it's not mobile. What we are moving toward is a much smaller, mobile device.
~ William Congo (on testing the Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser), The Associated Press (9 November 2002). Army's High-Speed Laser Hits Shell

I can tell you without a shred of doubt that this mother of all financial crises was largely a result of overconnectivity.
~ William H. Davidow (on the 2008 economic crisis), Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet (2011). Introduction: New Lessons from the Internet

The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.
~ William Orville Douglas, Points of Rebellion (1969). How America Views Dissent

We know by now that if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. ... This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.
~ William Orville Douglas, Points of Rebellion (1969). A Start Towards Reconstructing Our Society

For me, there are a lot of exciting things in front of me at Microsoft, things that we want to see if we can make happen with technology.
~ Bill Gates

I thought digital technology would eventually reverse urbanization, and so far that hasn't happened. But people always overestimate how much will change in the next three years, and they underestimate how much will change over the next 10 years.
~ Bill Gates, in The New York Times (6 November 2002). Bill Gates Views What He's Sown in Libraries

If the government, usually the largest 'business' in any country, is a leader in the use of technology, it will automatically lift the country's technical skills and drive the move to an information market.
~ Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999).

I've been struck by the role that technology plays and especially that the Internet played during this crisis. On September 11th hundreds of millions of people relied on the Internet to get news and to communicate with loved ones.
~ Bill Gates, Speech at New York City (25 October 2001). Windows XP Launch Remarks

IT jobs do not involve just sitting in a corner writing code. They are about working with people and business leaders, so you gain management skills and the enjoyment of working with other people.
~ Bill Gates, Interview in Computing (U.K.) (9 November 2005). Exclusive: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates talks to Computing - Part 2

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC.
~ Bill Gates, in CNN "Money" (7 April 2006). How I Work: Bill Gates

Technology has always been about making the impossible possible, and with Windows XP we hope to do just that, open up new possibilities.
~ Bill Gates, Speech at New York City (25 October 2001). Windows XP Launch Remarks

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
~ Bill Gates

[T]he Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
~ Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999).

There's a lot that can be done for people who are using technology in a better way.
~ Bill Gates

This is something we're very committed to, it's something that I think people are underestimating right now as they've seen some of the dot-com promises not come through. I think they're missing the fact that the basic technology is moving forward, the new platforms are here and this vision of the digital decade will be a reality.
~ Bill Gates, Keynote Speech at the 2003 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas NV (8 January 2003). Smarter Living in the Digital Decade

We're changing the world with technology.
~ Bill Gates

We're going to gain a lot of share here. We're going to make a lot of consumers happy.
~ Bill Gates, The Associated Press (24 October 2002). Aiming at AOL, Microsoft and Disney release combined Internet service

We're just at the beginning of what can be done with digital technology.
~ Bill Gates, Speech at Fusion 2001 (July 16, 2001).

Thousands of publications produced annually take full advantage of inexpensive technology, generating just what the author wants and the author's audience may need. Manuals, memoirs, reports, poetry, fiction -- anything can be produced in a desktop format.
~ William Germano, Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (2001). What Do Publishers Do?

Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before.
~ William Gibson, from Burning Chrome (1986). The Winter Market

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ...
~ William Gibson, Neuromancer (July 1984).

Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency.
~ William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberdeck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.
~ William Gibson, Neuromancer (July 1984).

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
~ William Gibson

The internet, if one could see its totality, would be a very profound expression of what it is to be human today. It's become the place where we do everything. It's become the place where we look for everything. We're doing something new here. ... I think it's probably as big a deal as the creation of cities.
~ William Gibson, in No Maps for These Territories (2000).

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.
~ William Gibson, in New York Times Magazine (14 July 1996).

[T]he street finds its own uses for things.
~ William Gibson, from Burning Chrome (1986; originally published in Omni, July 1982).

We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified ...
~ William Gibson, from Burning Chrome (1986). Johnny Mnemonic (originally published in Omni Magazine, 1981)

We're using technology to extend the human nervous system.
~ William Gibson, in No Maps for These Territories (2000).

When I am home, pretty much every day, and it's hard to say exactly what I am doing. Mostly just Googling and following up and getting lost and finding wonderful things. It's no more purposeful than sitting on the couch, flipping through 60 channels of television, but the randomness factor of what you can find and that weird inner connectivity provide a whole different kind of vitamins.
~ William Gibson, AdWeek "InPrint" (7 April 2003). On The Spot: William Gibson

In the ripeness of time the hope of humanity is realized.
~ William Gilpin, The Central Gold Region (1860). Chapter VIII: The South Pass of America

Many highly trained people naturally tend to think in terms of the dogma of their own technology, and it frightens them to twist their conventions out of phase. Their conventions sometimes constitute a background of knowledge upon which they rely for their emotional stability. Such experts do not want cracks to appear. They identify their psychic order with the cosmic order and any cracks are signs of their orderly cosmos breaking up.
~ William J.J. Gordon

I think we are trying to run the space age with horse and buggy moral and spiritual equipment. Technology you see has no morals; and with no moral restraints man will destroy himself ecologically, militarily, or in some other way. Only God can give a person moral restraints and spiritual strength.
~ Billy Graham

The greatest boon to Zippy has been the remote control devices on TV. Zippy's attention span is limited to a 15-second TV commercial. I was doing Zippy way back when people were still having to get up and change the channel. Their attention spans were shrinking but it was still a stretch to get into Zippy's fast-paced, channel-changing mentality. Now they're sitting there going click, click, click. I think there's a price to pay when your brain cells get used to that all night long. They're getting up to Zippy's speed.
~ William Henry Jackson (Bill) Griffith, New York Newsday (11 December 1988).

The main surprise [of the George Washington University Forecast of Emerging Technologies project] was the enormity of what was occurring: across-the-board breakthroughs in all fields. That's when I first defined the "Technology Revolution." We hear about this constantly today. ... The underlying reason that breakthroughs are occurring across all sectors is that technology and science are basically knowledge, and the information revolution is advancing the rate of accumulated knowledge in all of these various fields. The information revolution is creating this broader Technology Revolution.
~ William E. Halal, World Future Society Future Times (Summer 2000). Forecasts of Emerging Technologies

But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System -- and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.
~ Stephen William Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988). Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological -- technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science.
~ Stephen William Hawking, in Time magazine, Person of the Century (31 December 1999). A Brief History of Relativity

The Internet is like a gold-rush; the only people making money are those who sell the pans.
~ Will Hobbs, Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA)

There are no excuses for lack of dexterity. With only one tool to master, failure to develop efficiency with that tool to the fullest can be attributed only to lack of sincerity, laziness or stupidity. Those are hard words, but by any logic, justified.
~ William H. Jordan, No Second Place Winner (1965).

The Internet by definition is the kitchen sink.
~ William Jovanovich, in The Temper of the West: A Memoir (2003). Editing

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.
~ Bill Joy, in Wired Magazine (April 2000). Why The Future Doesn't Need Us

The dream of robotics is that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. ... The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030, and once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species -- to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.
~ Bill Joy, in Wired Magazine (April 2000). Forfeiting The Future

Our hands-off approach wasn't entirely a choice. The reality is that the Internet grew so fast that policy-makers could not have written a code to govern it even if they wanted to.
~ William Kennard, (23 September 1999)

For in the nuclear reactor, as the atomic power plant is known, man has at last all the energy he needs to create wealth and leisure and spiritual satisfaction in such abundance as to eliminate forever any reason for one nation to covet the wealth of another.
~ William L. Laurence, Men And Atoms: The Discovery, The Uses, And The Future Of Atomic Energy (1959).

Have I done the world good, or have I added a menace?
~ Guglielmo Marconi

I think almost every newspaper in the United States has lost circulation due to the Internet, including the Globe. I also think the Internet will lead to a lot of plagiarism in journalism. Writers can get lazy, jump on it and take others ideas instead of using their own creativity. I think the future is electronic. It's radio, television and the Internet; it's not really newspapers anymore. I think we'll always have newspapers but they'll lose influence.
~ Will McDonough, in Teen Ink (December 1999). An Interview with Will McDonough, Sports Writer

Technology is more than gadgets and machines; it is associated with a frame of mind, a preoccupation with getting results, a dangerous spirit that strains against limits and rules.
~ Wilson Carey McWilliams, from Technology in the Western Political Tradition (1993). Part I: The Emergence of Modern Technology, 4 Science and Freedom: America as the Technological Republic

Low-income communities may attract less investment in new telecommunications infrastructure, and in any case may lack populations with the education and motivation to take advantage of it. ... These places will experience the downside of the digital revolution. ... In particular; there is an obvious and serious danger that this reconfiguration of urban patterns will further cluster the affluent while leaving the poor in places with few good jobs and services.
~ William J. Mitchell, E-topia: Urban Life, Jim -- But Not As We Know It (1999).

If we're not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be transformed into a system in which a handful of companies use their control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic potential of this amazing technology.
~ Bill Moyers, Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform (8 November 2003).

The lesson to learn is get the technology into the hands of a lot of people and let them find the value.
~ Bill Murphy

The Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment.
~ William H. Rehnquist (ruling that Children's Internet Protection Act did not violate the First Amendment; majority opinion), United States v. American Library Association, 539 U.S. 194 (23 June 2003).

Technocracy wants to do everything by machinery. ... Machinery is doing just fine. If it can't kill you, it will put you out of work.
~ Will Rogers

Ajax goes up and down the field, asking for himself.
~ William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida. Act III, scene iii

The better technology does not always sell better, even if it is first.
~ William J. Spencer

Our primary focus is the fans, and this technology augments our ability to deliver richer fan experiences by increasing the broadcast enhancements available to the networks. Equally important, this in-studio system will be considerably more efficient for the networks to implement during event telecasts.
~ Bill Squadron, Sportvision, Inc. Press Release (18 November 2002). Sportvision Awarded Key New Patent for Technology Allowing Downstream Virtual Insertion During Sports Broadcasts

This is the Holy Grail of all this -- viewer participation. ... For the next generation, they'll eat this up.
~ Bill Squadron, Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal (6 July 2001). High-tech comes to sportscasts -- despite some resistance

As you sit there in the radio room talking, you send your imagination hurtling out across the winter-clad earth, over the roofs of city buildings, out over the snow-covered fields, leaping rivers and lakes ... into the hearts and souls of your fellow men, sitting in their homes by their own firesides and you picture them sitting with great eagerness in their souls, waiting, listening for your message and the thing takes hold of your soul. It is a thrilling adventure every time I talk over the radio!
~ William Leroy "Bill" Stidger (written in 1922), quoted in Evangelism's First Modern Media Star: Reverend Bill Stidger (2002).

Even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel, it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer.
~ William Symonds, (1837).

In case you haven't heard, the Internet is not a superhighway.
~ Bill Washburn, Internet World (February 1995).

The denizen of the technological state of the future will have everything his heart ever desired, except, of course, his freedom.
~ John Wilkinson, in The Technological Society (1964). Translator's Introduction

Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.
~ George F. Will

Our technology is at last giving us what we've always wanted -- nameless, faceless, isolated individuals living by bureaucratic rules, entitlements and balanced self-interest. I can no longer expect you to know me, much less trust me. Now it's enough for you simply to be fair, to treat me as equal to all the other numbers in your data bank.
~ William H. Willimon, in the Christian Century (September 9-16, 1987). Community & Computers: Babel, Bytes & Bits

Accessibility is the law of the land. Work with companies on making their products accessible and to become 508-compliant. There are business opportunities for you.
~ John M. Williams, Speech at "2001: A Technology Odyssey" conference (3 August 2001). Finding New Markets for Products for Blind and Visually Impaired People

I think cyberpunk was a series of strategies for thinking about the future. It showed a media-saturated, post-capitalist future in which technological change surged through every level of society at breakneck speed, and in its own way. Since that's the future we actually got, I can't see that cyberpunk could possibly be any less relevant than it is now.
~ Walter Jon Williams, interview in The Zone! magazine (January 2003). A Cascade Of Invention

The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community, and by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.
~ Walter Jon Williams, interview in The Zone! magazine (January 2003). A Cascade Of Invention

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.
~ Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson, The Future of Life (2002).

[W]hen the Paris Exhibition closes, the electric light will close with it, and very little more will be heard about it.
~ William James Erasmus Wilson, (1878)