You’ll see more and more perfection of that – computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.

Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it’s taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, ‚Let’s get out the camera and get that shot.‘ You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.

It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

If there were camera phones back in the day, the biggest athletes in the world would have had a lot of explaining to do.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.

Cameras aren’t guns. They can’t really hurt you.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.

There is something in the way that we are now, with our cell phones, and people are not looking at each other and not being in the moment with each other, that kids feel isolated.

Everybody around me had a Snapchat, and I said I would never get on it. I’m still on Instagram, you know? They convinced me to get Snapchat.

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.

Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It’s a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door.

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‚Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.‘

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

I think a lot of the time there isn’t such a black-and-white difference between what’s a platform and what’s an app. It’s really just like the most important apps become platforms.

Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.

We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

Move fast with stable infrastructure.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

I’m an iPod person.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can’t replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.

I find it amusing that I’m on the Internet now, because I’ve criticized it, but mainly I’ve criticized it on the basis of, ‚What are you going to do with it?‘

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

The Internet, man, is a beautiful thing.

I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

FaceTime helps me a lot. I feel like I’m at home even though I’m not.

I know there’s a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that’s fine with me.

The Internet is just another experiment showing us more sides of us.

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.