Technology

October 28, 2012 Editor 0

THE story of technology is the story of man’s ascent. It is also the story of business. No sooner had prehistoric man discovered how to produce stone tools than he learnt to barter them. Civilisations that mastered technology controlled trade and became powerful, from ancient Chinese and Greeks to the British during the industrial revolution. Today, we are arguably living through a technological revolution as significant as any in history. As ever, it is being driven by business.  

 

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
Douglas Adams, author (1952–2001)

“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
Charles Babbage (pictured), father of the computer (1791–1871)

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
Warren Bennis, academic (1925–)

“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, founder of Microsoft (1955–)

“When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it–whether it be a factory or a government.”
Alexander Chase, writer (1926–), Perspectives (1966)

“By and large, a disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market. Hence, most companies with a practiced discipline of listening to their best customers and identifying new products that promise greater profitability and growth are rarely able to build a case for investing in disruptive technologies until it is too late.”
Clayton Christensen, academic (1952–), The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997)

“If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.”
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (1955–)

“One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
Elbert Hubbard, philosopher (1856–1915), A Message to Garcia (1899)

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.”
Alice Kahn, writer (1943–)

“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.”
Lewis Mumford, historian (1895–1990)

“The Christian notion of the possibility of redemption is incomprehensible to the computer.”
Vance Packard, writer (1914–96)

“The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.”
Cyril Northcote Parkinson, historian (1909–93)

“If it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s paradise.”
Kurt Vonnegut, author (1992–2007), Player Piano (1952)

“The IBM machine has no ethic of its own; what it does is enable one or two people to do the computing work that formerly required many more people. If people often use it stupidly, it’s their stupidity, not the machine’s, and a return to the abacus would not exorcise the failing. People can be treated as drudges just as effectively without modern machines.”
William Whyte, writer (1917–99), The Organization Man (1956)

“Civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”
Oscar Wilde, writer (1854–1900), The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

Taken from The Economist’s “Book of Business Quotations”

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Categories: The Economist

Tags: Babbage, Technology THE story