Tao Te Ching
Technology
Few criticize the rapid advancement of technology; and yet, this infatuation easily obscures many negative consequences and, as many of these quotes dramatically point out, technology's dark side looms throughout history. Marshall McLuhan calls new technology "self-amputations of our own being" and one of the fundamental causes of war. In Finnegan's Wake James Joyce describes "ten thunders" - cryptographic descriptions of history's major technological changes and many of their debilitating consequences. In Brave New World Huxley describes how new technology can undermine our ability to think for ourselves. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein pointed out this danger early on and science fiction books continue to dramatically communicate this theme.
Quotes (84)
“They have advanced technology but they aren’t mesmerized by their tools, hypnotized by their computers, enslaved by their inventions.”
“where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple”
“When one family has weapons, it affects its village. When a village has weapons, it affects its state. When a state has weapons, it affects All under Heaven. When All under Heaven have weapons, chaos is preordained.”
“All sciences are only the ordinances and opinions of men, as injurious as profitable, as pestilent as wholesome, as ill as good, in no part perfect, but doubtful and full of error and contention.”
“The very contemplation of things as they are—without superstition, imposture, or confusion—is in itself more beneficial than all the fruits of technology and invention.”
“Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution... it was iron and corn which first civilized men and ruined humanity.”
“The use of gunpowder… was soon propagated to the extremities of Asia; and the advantage of the European was confined to his easy victories over the savages of the new world.”
“If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery (gunpowder) with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.”
“It is questionable if all he mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.”
“Men have become the tools of their tools… have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”
“All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.”
“Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”
“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
“the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways”
“The more we multiply means, the less certain and general is the use we are able to make of them... the entire problem is one of the development of science and its application to life”
“The final reason for Rome's defeat was the failure of mind and spirit to rise to a new and great opportunity. They were split into the sharpest oppositions, extremes, a narrow selfishness that kept men blind when their own self-preservation demanded a world-wide outlook. Material development outstripped human development; the Dark Ages took possession of Europe, classical antiquity ended.”
“Technological civilization... rests fundamentally on power-driven machinery... science in all its branches - physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology - is the servant and upholder of this system.”
“Because we lack [superhuman reason], the conquests of science and technology become a mortal danger to us rather than a blessing.”
“These multiplying inventions are the new organs with which we control our environment... menial labor that degraded both master and man is lifted from human shoulders... man will be freed for the tasks of the mind.”
“all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends... we repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.”
“We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process and we are the same trousered apes at 2000 MPH as when we used legs.”
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the seat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children.”
“We all want the things which the factory produces and none of us is sensitive enough to care how much in human values the efficiency of the modern factory costs.”
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
“Because technology advances, we fancy that we are making corresponding progress all along the line… that we only have to go on being yet cleverer to achieve social order, international peace and personal happiness.”
“Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.”
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.”
“As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.”
“An educational system that aims at vocational training or social adjustment, or technological advance is not likely to lead to the kind of maturity that the present crisis demands… a country that is powerful, inexperienced, and uneducated can be a great danger to world peace.”
“Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
“There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.”
“A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.”
“We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society’s innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life.”
“Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.”
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
“These self-amputations which we call new technologies generate vast new environments against which the individual organism is quite helpless.”
“We will be lucky if we an postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time... to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one's watch.”
“The liberties taken with the life sciences are leading to the robotization and debasement of mankind, and pushing humanity closer to its day of reckoning... What is regarded as 'high technology' is really only peripheral. Life scientists in particular must awaken from this foolishness that has them toying with natural life and causes them to gallop after euphoric illusions that are nothing but mere shadows of life.”
“While technology seems to bring us together, it does so only by making new ways of separating us from one another… we are in danger of being suffocated by our own tastes.”
“In this world that our technological skill has made rigid, artificial, and spiritually void; we have a desperate need to recover spontaneity and depth.”
“When technology is used to increase employment rather than get rid of it, work becomes an artificial creation of ever more meaningless routines”
“Creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behavior to be successful.”
“Once our technology is no longer polluting our environment and used primarily for killing people, it can be used to create an economy of abundance. Such an economy no longer requires us to be individual, group, race, national, ethnic, religious or gender enemies of each other because there will be plenty of everything for every one of us on the planet. Given our present technology, starvation and deprivation are artificially maintained.”
“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
“Inevitably modern technology has polarized society. It has polluted the environment. It has disabled very simple native abilities and made people dependent on objects... The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.”
“Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and such machines force people to behave like machines... Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.”
“The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology but to break down the barrier of dualistic thought and understand technology for what it is—a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.”
“It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit”
“We’re used, our lives shaped and controlled, by our machines, cars, planes, weaponry, bulldozers, computers. These Taoists don’t surrender their power to their creations.”
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
“Technology is ideology without words and all the more powerful for their absence.”
“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
“To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine. To operate a machine one must operate like a machine... The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself... The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness... Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.”
“Losing consciousness in digital dreams
Ignoring life caught up in schemes
Time to come on back home
And start being alone.”
“The future of business? – A faster and faster transition from the mechanical, rote, and unskilled to the innovative, educated and personal as technology, computers, and robots assume bigger and bigger roles.”
“McLuhan’s comment that ‘every new technology requires a new war’ may help explain why we have so many new wars popping up all the time - not just wars with guns but cultural wars, race wars, gender wars, political meme wars, religious wars, social hierarchy wars, wars of philosophy…”
“The more information we take in, the less we have. The less contemplation, the more new writes over the old, the more mindless and meaningless our lives become.”
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
“A cell phone isn't a toy. It's a very lucky technical miracle for all of us. It's a prime weapon against our essential loneliness but I can't say I've ever felt that lonely.”
“Everything is compartmentalized, so you can never experience things completely… packaged food, packaged vacations, package deals of all kinds. There is no room to experience doubtlessness in that world… no room to experience reality fully and properly.”
“There’s no such thing as sustainable technology or economic development without sustainable human development to match.”
“I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.”
“Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around but also… self-reproducing… They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything.”
“behind the walkman, BMWs, all our wonderful technological inventions, … there is a purpose waiting to be discovered”
“Technology is making borders irrelevant. The governments who still value their borders refuse to understand this basic fact... Of course, governments and borders are still very important for the time being”
“There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.”
“One of the main effects of science an technology has been to destroy the world more quickly.”
“Aldous Huxley predicted, ‘What we love will ruin us’ and described a human race destroyed by ignorance, lust for constant entertainment, technology, and too many goods.”
“Until now, capitalism has pirated science and technology... In the 21st century, we should be able to use science and technology to create a waste-free, sustainable world for humans, animals, and plants. This is the highest, and as yet undiscovered, aspiration for science and technology.”
“The kind of hedonism popularized by the Rubáiyát can help to put us back in touch with the virtues of direct experience in our age where so much of daily life is filtered through the two-dimensional electronic flickers on a smartphone or tablet. We are becoming observers of life rather than participants, immersed in a society of the digital spectacle. Let us keep a copy of the Rubáiyát in our pockets, alongside the iPhone, and remember the words of wise Khayyám: ‘While you live Drink! – for, once dead, you never shall return.’”
“Kurt Vonnegut wrote about TV being like the lead in the water pipes that sent the Romans crazy. But I think social media is currently like that, times ten. It's like LSD in that water supply, going through those lead-filled pipes.”
“It is not technology that explains failure; it is less about technology, per se, and more about the leaders' failure to envision the future of their business as the world changes around them.”
“The same technological breakthroughs that have given us cell phones and personal computers are the basis for creating weapons that can wipe out entire populations... Email, the Internet and other computer technologies that were supposed to make our lives easier often overwhelm us”
“The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching... the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo sapiens by completely different beings”
“Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”
“Humanity now finds itself hosting a high-stakes competition. It is a race between technological progress and societal progress—between our ability to create and destroy, and our ability to govern, manage, and coexist.”
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