Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Technology companies tend to operate in winner-take-all spaces and thus adopt a very high-commitment culture. That is, if there are 10 or 100 mapping apps or social networks, the one company left standing is worth billions, and the rest are worth a very small fraction of that (probably only what people will pay for the talent on hand). As a result, the organizations are ultra-efficient and expect long hours and constant availability. It’s either win or lose big for a lot of companies, and there’s not much in-between.
When the servants of the Lord determine to do as He commands, we move ahead. As we proceed, we are joined at the crossroads by those who have been prepared to help us. They come with skills and abilities precisely suited to our needs. And, we find provisions; information, inventions, help of various kinds, set along the way waiting for us to take them up. It is though someone knew we would be traveling that way. We see the invisible hand of the Almighty providing for us. For instance, inventions in the fields of travel and communication have come along just as we were ready for them…The airplane did not come as an accidental discovery…Revelation was involved. It came precisely when we could use it to move across the world to restore the Gospel…When we are ready, there will be revealed whatever we need—we will find it waiting at the crossroads.
Sister Susa Young Gates..once asked her father (Brigham Young) how it would ever be possible to accomplish the great amount of temple work that must be done, if all are given a full opportunity for exaltation. He told her there would be many inventors of labor saving devices, so that our daily duties could be performed in a short time, leaving us more and more time for temple work. The inventions have come, and are still coming, but many simply divert the time gained to other channels, and not for the purpose intended by the Lord.
...they were becoming caught up in the technology and losing sight of the dangers.
The entertainment value or intellectual stimulation you get from tweaking every little thing up and down that stack is not the same as what it once was...The reason you're spending so much on maintenance is because you have such a complex infrastructure to begin with, and all the diversity is part of that cost and trying to maintain all the different flavors and configurations and integrations and customizations. You've created something so complex and customized it's unique to you. You've become a technology company because what you've created is so unique.
Innovation is an unnatural, generally uncomfortable process. It needs to be asked for, nurtured, demanded, and prodded - cattle prodded, at times - for companies to keep delivering.
You young men and young women, put your cell phones away! Put the technology away and learn to talk to each other face-to-face, eye-to-eye. My goodness, that’s the way this happens. You’ve got yourselves in cocoons.
There's a fine line between knowing little enough that you are prepared to try audacious stuff, and knowing enough that you can actually put together a team. In some ways, a lack of knowledge was a boon to us. We didn't know what was impossible, and so we did an impossible thing.
There is nothing inherently expensive about rockets. It's just that those who have built and operated them in the past have done so with horrendously poor efficiency.
People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that.
With the growth of the Church, we likely could never build a hall large enough to accommodate all who would wish to assemble in one place. Nor would accelerating travel costs make possible their coming. The gifts of science have provided a more convenient way. We are confident that as the work of the Lord expands, he will inspire men to develop the means whereby the membership of the Church, wherever they may be, can be counseled in an intimate and personal way by his chosen prophet.
Every system has an architecture. Two things I've said about architecture in the past: first, every system has an architecture - most are accidental, some are intentional; second, the hyperproductive projects I've encountered all tend to proceed by the incremental and iterative release of an executable architecture. In short, architecture is central to enduring software.
The role of technology in this work has been accelerated by the Lord himself, who has had a guiding hand in its development and will continue to do so. However, we stand only on the threshold of what we can do with these tools. I feel that our most enthusiastic projections can capture only a tiny glimpse of how these tools can help us—and of the eternal consequences of these efforts.
In recent years we have begun using information technology to hasten the sacred work of providing ordinances for the deceased. The role of technology in this work has been accelerated by the Lord himself, who has had a guiding hand in its development and will continue to do so. However, we stand only on the threshold of what we can do with these tools. I feel that our most enthusiastic projections can capture only a tiny glimpse of how these tools can help us—and of the eternal consequences of these efforts.
Why does anyone need to keep in touch with 400 people that they hardly ever see, people they would never go out of their way to contact, were it not as easy as it is on Facebook?
...your best bet is best practices.
Now, do you think that these...inventions by Marconi, by Edison, by Bell, by Stephenson and by the other inventors... discovered them through their thought or accidentally?...Now let me say briefly that that I do not believe for one moment that these discoveries have come by chance, or that they have come because of superior intelligence possessed by men today over those who lived in ages past. They have come because the time is ripe, because the Lord has willed it, and because he has poured out his Spirit on all flesh.
Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer.
I for one welcome our new computer overlords.
IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of "thinking" machines. "Quiz show contestant" may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last.
My puny human brain, just a few bucks worth of water, salts, and proteins, hung in there just fine against a jillion-dollar supercomputer.
One of the problems of the Internet is that we didn't install what I like to call strong user authentication or strong file authentication. We didn't anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust of all the users.
Sister Susa Young Gates…once asked her father [Brigham Young] how it would ever be possible to accomplish the great amount of temple work that must be done, if all are given a full opportunity for exaltation. He told her there would be many inventors of labor-saving devices, so that our daily duties could be performed in a short time, leaving us more and more time for temple work. The inventions have come, and are still coming, but many simply divert the time gained to other channels, and not for the purpose intended by the Lord.
We rightfully worry about taming our technology so that it serves us, rather than dominates us. But we cannot tame our technology without taming ourselves.
Most of us – people and businesses – rush towards the future without creating the culture that supports that future. We buy the watch but not the watchfulness.
The Internet is a parasite, that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them. Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweat shops in a foreign land.
Men use the telegraph for the purpose I have named, and in many respects it is used to good advantage...but the great object which the Lord had in view when this great invention or discovery was brought forth, was to enable knowledge to be sent from the mountain tops, from the midst of Zion, when his glory should begin to be manifested in the midst of his people in the latter days.
Pundits were panicking about device addiction and misinformation; the internet, where knowledge was supposed to be free, was beginning to reveal itself as a giant surveillance engine that accumulated wealth and power for the few, while fragmenting society into increasingly antagonistic and paranoid groups.
The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.
And privacy? Forget about it. We are destined to become like tagged bears, constantly tracked, but too addicted to the data stream to switch our intimate devices off.
It's often said, and I agree, that "'Better' is the enemy of 'good enough'" -- but I'm not prepared to declare myself the loyal ally of one or the other. There are times when I'm prepared to hold the line against the assault of "better," but there are also times when "good enough" really is not... "Good enough" is a phrase that ought to be used only when "success" is clearly defined. For example, President Kennedy in his May 25, 1961 address to Congress didn't say, "I believe we need to take humanity to the stars." He said, "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The latter statement clearly defined success in terms of a deadline and a result: it drew a boundary, outside of which any additional capability at any additional cost could quickly be dismissed as another challenge for another day...
Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers.
All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday - that is, not innovating - is far more risky than making tomorrow.
Engineering isn't about perfect solutions. It's about doing what you can with limited resources.
Employees doing tasks that can be automated, the armies of middle managers who supervise them and all those with mediocre performance reviews and without hot skills are living on borrowed time.
The time of harvest is come. A new era of family history work has arrived. As President Gordon B. Hinckley recently noted, “The Lord has inspired skilled men and women in developing new technologies which we can use to our great advantage in moving forward this sacred work.”
If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
The technology industry is as much driven by fads as the fashion world, and there is a tendency to try to use new technologies for problems they aren’t suited to handle.
The transformative power of smartphones comes from their size and connectivity. Size makes them the first truly personal computers. The phone takes the processing power of yesterday’s supercomputers—even the most basic model has access to more number-crunching capacity than NASA had when it put men on the Moon in 1969 - and applies it to ordinary human interactions.
The boring old PC sitting on your desk does not know much about you. But phones travel around with you—they know where you are, what websites you visit, whom you talk to, even how healthy you are.
The smartphone turns the person next to you into a potential publisher of your most private or embarrassing moments.
The same phones that allow governments to spy on their citizens also record the brutality of officials and spread information and dissenting opinions. They feed the demand for autonomy and help protest movements to coalesce. A device that hands so much power to the individual has the potential to challenge authoritarianism.
Smartphones are digital census takers, creating a more detailed view of society than has ever existed before and doing so in real time. Governed by suitable regulations, anonymised personal data can be used, among many other things, to optimise traffic flows, prevent crime and fight epidemics.
Smartphones will remake entire industries, at unheard of speed.
I talked to the personnel director of one large company who told me that for every job of common labor available on today's market, there are twenty-five applicants. One man receives a job; twenty-four are turned away because they do not have the skills. On the other hand, if that same person who is applying for work with this company in Salt Lake City has a college degree in a technical field, he can take his pick of any three jobs, and if he is in the top fifty percent of his class, he can take his pick of twenty-five or thirty jobs. For youth, it is important that they receive an education, so that they can qualify for their places in life.
Let me remind each of us, however, that education doesn't simply mean that we attend school. Education means that we learn to think. Henry Ford put it in words when he said, "An educated man is not one who has trained his mind to remember a few dates in history. He is one who can accomplish things. If a man cannot think, he is not an educated man, regardless of how many college degrees he may have attained. Thinking is the hardest work a man can do, which is probably the reason we have so few thinkers."
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
Today, the technology is there to give early and normally ample warning when a powerful tornado approaches. When a tornado strikes, all of us are at risk.
Don't get enamored with technology for its own sake, but for what it can do for people.
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
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