William Gibson Quotes About Technology
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One of the things I have taken for granted, in terms of how technology works in the world, is the people that develop it and get it out there don't really know what we are going to do with until we have really gotten ahold of it and it has become ubiquitous. And then we wind up doing things that its inventors never dreamed of and those things become the real change drivers. That is actually where the whole technocracy thing falls apart for me, because the people who invented it can't predict what we're going to do with it.
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The 'Net is a waste of time.
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The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that.
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Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
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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.
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As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
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That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
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I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us.
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We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
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You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. 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. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.
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It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
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I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.
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