A Quote by Richard Powers

My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible. — © Richard Powers
My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.
Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.
Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.
Technology business increasingly becomes difficult to predict because technology itself is accelerating in change, and human nature and markets are more stagnant and static. But the dynamic engine of technological innovation continues unabated.
My goal as an actor has always been to reach a level where I can find a lot of interesting work, and I think I'm at that point now. The Oscar has given me a lot of recognition.
No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.
If you can reach just 10 percent of the population, you can begin to reach a tipping point; that's where true social movements take place - it's a numbers game. And when you reach that number, the truth becomes obvious and empires of injustice crumble and fall.
Technological civilizations don't last long. You're all right until you get a printing press. Then a race starts between technology and common sense. And maybe technology always wins.
We have to do away with a false and misleading dualism, one which abstracts man on the one hand and technology on the other, as if the two were quite separate kinds of realities.... Man is by nature a technological animal; to be human is to be technological.... When we speak of technology, this is another way of speaking about man himself in one of his manifestations.
Most technological advances in our life now come from serendipitous discoveries. That is a contraction of rocket technology and computer technology and atomic clock technology.
Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.
On some occasions, it is every footballer's dream to play for the national team, but if you don't reach it, you always need to work harder to reach a higher level, a level you wouldn't reach if you didn't have this as a goal.
At the top end I do think it's time we have goal-line technology, I'm not mad on other technology but certainly goal-line technology.
We do believe in setting goals. We live by goals. In athletics we always have a goal. When we go to school, we have the goal of graduation and degrees. Our total existence is goal-oriented. We must have goals to make progress, encouraged by keeping records . . . as the swimmer or the jumper or the runner does . . . Progress is easier when it is timed, checked, and measured. . . .Goals are good. Laboring with a distant aim sets the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best. Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain.
There is always a step small enough from where we are to get us to where we want to be. If we take that small step, there's always another we can take, and eventually a goal thought to be too far to reach becomes achievable.
I am extraordinarily fascinated by the future of technology. We are in the early infancy of technology, and we have an opportunity to guide how technology develops and integrates into our lives. I talk a lot about the 'invisible interface,' or the idea that we can utilize technology without being absorbed into a screen.
You can't just stop technological progress. Even if one country stops researching artificial intelligence, some other countries will continue to do it. The real question is what to do with the technology. You can use exactly the same technology for very different social and political purposes. So I think people shouldn't be focused on the question of how to stop technological progress because this is impossible. Instead the question should be what kind of usage to make of the new technology. And here we still have quite a lot of power to influence the direction it's taking.
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