Technological progress

Howard Aiken (computer scientist, quoted in Portraits in Silicon by Robert Slater, 1989) - Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Robert Allen - The greatest achievement of the Industrial Revolution was that the 18th-century inventions were not one-offs like the achievements of earlier centuries. Instead, the 18th-century inventions kicked off a continuing stream of innovations.

Isaac Asimov - I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

Al Boliska (radio presenter) - Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?

The Boston Post (Editorial, 1865) - Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.

David Burge (2023) - Every important new technology is initially described as "dystopian Pandora's box nightmare that will destroy life as we know it," and then 20 years later as "a basic human right that should be free to all," and often by the same people

Clayton Christensen (in The Innovator’s Dilemma, 1997) - An organisation’s capabilities become its disabilities when disruptive innovation is afoot.

Sir Winston Churchill (1932) - Fifty years hence . . . [w]e shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.

Tyler Cowen - When dynamic technologies interact with static institutions, conflict is inevitable.

Lee Deforest (inventor of the vacuum tube, 1957) - Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances.

Dilbert - Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.

Andrew Hargadon, in How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate, 2003 - Many people still believe a better mousetrap is all it takes. But of the 2000+ mousetraps patented, only two have sold well, and they were both designed in the 19th century.

Robert A. Heinlein - Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

Steve Jobs - Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!"

Lord Kelvin (1895) - Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Alex Lewyt (manufacturer of vacuum cleaners, 1955) - Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years.

Thomas Macaulay (1830) - In every age, everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; nobody seems to reckon on any improvement in the next generation. Why do people expect nothing but deterioration?

Marshall McLuhan (in Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 1972) - Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Joël Mokyr - The term in silico has taken its place next to in vivo and in vitro in experimental work. And entire new fields such as “computational physics” and “computational biology” have sprung up ex nihilo.

Joël Mokyr - My job as an economic historian is to point out that the good old days were old but not good, and to remind us just how much better life is today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. I’ll bet that 90% of Americans do not know what infant mortality rates looked like at the time of the Civil War or what it was like to experience surgery before anesthesia. People view the past fondly not because they have an objective view of it, but because they were younger and more vigorous then.

 Ian Morris - Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. And they rarely know what they’re doing.

Traditional - Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.