If you try to make something beautiful, it is often ugly. If you try to make something useful, it is often beautiful. (Oscar Wilde) Manuel Castells in his book, "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture - The Rise of the Network Society", points to a dialectical interaction between technology and society: "Technology does not determine society: it embodies it. But neither does society determine technological innovation: it uses it" This is also the answer to the stupid and oft repeated question "Why keep on reinventing the wheel?" Well, because my Nissan would have lousy handling with stone wheels. -- Max M When man wanted to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. Without knowing it, he was a Surrealist -- Guillaume Apollinaire There are wings of flesh and feather, there are wings of bone and leather There are wings of painted paper pinned to polished wooden spars But wings of force and fire never falter, never tire And the wings of human knowledge span the void between the stars. -- Catherine Faber, Wings of Human Knowledge If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs. -William Feather One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word. -- Robert Heinlein The beauty of mechanical problems is that they are often visible to the naked and untrained eye. If white smoke is rising from a disk drive, that is probably where the problem lies (unless your disk drive has just elected the new Pope). -John Bear For 150,000 years humans looked wistfully at the birds. Now we can fly among them on the wings of equations. Indeed, we soar far higher than any bird ever flew. - Damien Broderick Now she speaks rapidly. "Do you know *why* you want to program?" He shakes his head. He hasn't the faintest idea. "For the sheer *joy* of programming!" she cries triumphantly. "The joy of the parent, the artist, the craftsman. "You take a program, born weak and impotent as a dimly-realized solution. You nurture the program and guide it down the right path, building, watching it grow ever stronger. Sometimes you paint with tiny strokes, a keystroke added here, a keystroke changed there." She sweeps her arm in a wide arc. "And other times you savage whole *blocks* of code, ripping out the program's very *essence*, then beginning anew. But always building, creating, filling the program with your own personal stamp, your own quirks and nuances. Watching the program grow stronger, patching it when it crashes, until finally it can stand alone -- proud, powerful, and perfect. This is the programmer's finest hour!" Softly at first, then louder, he hears the strains of a Sousa march. "This ... this is your canvas! your clay! Go forth and create a masterwork!" Our toys, writ large, echo profound revolutions in simulation, the science of materials, and digital communication Mark Pesce, The Playful World "We can't escape what we are, which is a technological species. There's no way back" Iain M. Banks He stands like a statue, becomes part of the machine Feeling all the bumpers, always playing clean Plays by intuition, the digit counters fall That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball. from Pinball Wizard, sung by Elton John in Who's "Tommy" Divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes (De re rustica, III.1) Divine nature gave us fields, human skill built our cities Varro (M. Terentius Varro Reatinus) The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them. - Joseph Campbell There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use." - Freeman Dyson "I think I have shown that there are good scientific reasons for taking seriously the possibility that life and intelligence can succeed in molding this universe of ours to their own purposes." - Freeman Dyson If god hadn't intended for man to fly, he'd have been born without wings. As it so happens, he was born with wings all over the place, on birds, on insects, even on bats. Michael Vassar "The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs." -Joseph Weizenbaum Furthermore, the people that tend to work on freeware like Linux tend to be "Guru" types --- the kind of people who are better programmers than average. Why are they better? Because they're the type of people who spend their spare time programming, because they enjoy it. Their driving force is coming from an inner need to produce something beautiful (yes, computer programs can be beautiful). In a way, the Linux kernel is a work of art, produced by some of the best programming artists that Earth has to offer, all in their spare time, all directly out of their hearts. When a bug appears, it gets fixed quickly precisely *because* the artists suddenly feel a pang of ugliness, and are compelled to fix it in order to restore beauty. When you get hundreds of artists together doing this (here's where Eric's idea of parallelism comes in), you can get pretty spectacular results. Wayne Hayes Man "will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent role of the machines than he is in his present wild state." - Samuel Butler A machine is as distinctly and brilliantly expressively human as a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid. Gregory Vlastos If we treated global warming as a technical problem instead of a moral outrage, we could cool the world. Reason Magazine Technology always forces change Peter Cochrane We should engineer as we should farm - assuming we are going to live forever Peter Cochrane We live on the edge of a strange attractor, on the edge of chaos and disaster, always just one step away from disaster - only our technology saves us" Peter Cochrane Musical instruments have often been the most advanced technologies around, sometimes surpassing even the instruments of war. More importantly, though, instruments are always the most eloquent technologies of an era. As the most eloquent machines, instruments predict the future of culture, when we will communicate increasingly through machines. --Jaron Lanier, liner notes to INSTRUMENTS OF CHANGE "If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives." - Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe An order-of-magnitude quantitative change is a qualitative change." Authur C. Clarke > Why, exactly, do you need a head-up and a head tracker to replace paper ? Because paper is static, and not smart. Because it's flat, monochrome, kills trees, produces waste, and requires lots of pointless infrastructure which is not under my immediate control. The only niche for the paper is not bureau, but the toilet. Paper does not listen when I talk to it, and it doesn't at all search well. Because I need hands to handle it. Paper doesn't render VRML very well, nor can it do live video. Only audio paper can do is . Paper heaps have no memory on their previous arrangement. Paper is bulky, not machine readable, and does not age gracefully. Paper can't add, divide, or FFT. Paper attracts termites and fires. Paper contains dioxines. People have been killed by collapsing paper. On the whole, paper is a definite hazard to civilization. Eugene Leitl Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade. Donna Haraway Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine ... -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" when I say "technology", I mean intentional development, such as speech, dancing skills or problem solving methods, and not necessarily "cold things with sharp corners" Alexander Chislenko "The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by artists to prove that only a great artist can be a great technician. The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by technicians to prove that only a great technician can be a great artist." - Alex Gross, East Village Other, 1968 In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't. Alan J. Perlis The danger here is not technology. It is ignorance. Brian A. Williamson We *are* technology W. Gibson Old tek Lo tek No tek Renewables certainly seem to be the "energy source of tomorrow," and we should definitely develop them - but we're likely to need fusion the *day after* tomorrow, so we'd better develop it too. (Acknowledgements to W.D. Kay or Northeastern Univ. for the idea which led to this last sentence.) "the sand remembers once there was beach and sunshine but chip is warm too Dicko A successful tool is used to do something undreamed of by its author. - Johnson Clarke's ideal: No Machine May Contain Any Moving Parts. Technologies, by themselves, are value-neutral. Human use of technology never is. This bitch won't fly unless we get out and push it, and it won't crash into the ground unless we point it at it. We determine the end points of our own work. Mark D. Pesce Also, it's important to regard technology in the long sweep of history as being one with history. In fact, it's one with biology, one with the rise of multicellular life forms, and it's headed someplace - probably. But it's not alien to the sweep of development and beauty and order in the universe. Vernor Vinge Why do we have to keep making things better and faster? Are we not content with the highest living standards in human history? Is life not fast enough? Not convenient enough? What do we want? Silly us; those questions don’t matter! It's built into our soul-print: the musician will play, the writer will write, the tinkerer will tinker. Asking us to stop progress is asking us to stop all these things-- to stop *life*-- and we can’t, not even if we wanted to. Progress is just what happens when people *live*. Dave Dahl http://www.wwwa.com/fear.html Godlike powers can be mass-produced and inexpensive Carl Feynman