Technocracy

“ This future fails to accommodate the development of human activity at the new scale in terms of population, resources, adaptation, and growth it has reached. Within this model, its proponents preserve as the underlying structure the current set of dependencies among the many parts involved in human activity, and a stubborn deterministic view of simplistic inclination. Unreflected celebration of technocracy as the sole agent of change must be treated with the same suspicion as its demonization. The current participation of technology in human activity is indeed impressive. ”

“ Why, we don't even have decent love these days. A man can't marry a woman for her money, and vice-versa. Everyone under Technocracy gets the same amount of credit. No more Reno, no more alimony, no more breach of promise, or law suits! Everything is cut and dried. The days of society weddings and coming out parties are gone—cause everyone is equal. ”

“ Modern Industry rent the veil that concealed from men their own social process of production, and that turned the various, spontaneously divided branches of production into so many riddles, not only to outsiders, but even to the initiated. The principle which it pursued, of resolving each process into its constituent movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of man, created the new modern science of technology. ”

“ An honorable exception is the scientists’ old and fine tradition of world-wide unity and loyalty in the search for objective truth.
Now the problem of rational control over robot machines and other parts of the new technology is no respecter of national boundaries. To be solved it requires a world-wide point of view, a loyalty to human society and its best interests, a social point of view.
Almost all that you and I have and do and think is the result of a long history of human society on this earth. All men on the earth today are descendants of other men who lived 1000, 2000, 3000 ... ”

“ Why the need for a concept of Rapid Dominance? The answer lies in the combined realities of modern technology, economics, and politics.
Technology
The evolution or revolution of information technology is impacting everything we do and how we do it on a worldwide basis. The far-reaching effects of the resulting information highway that crosses all boundaries are already impacting the strategic decisions, economics, and politics of the world of nation states. Borders are no defense for the penetration of information even in highly controlled or authoritarian societies. ”

“ As a first step, let us declare that technology is the foundation of future economic development, as China did in 1998. ICT will jumpstart our old stalling economy and make it leapfrog into the new economy. ”

“ Technology, talent and tolerance – what good news for Europe, and what a good maxim for our action! Technology, talent and tolerance – Europe thrives on innovation. Europe thrives on scientific and technological, economic and social progress. ”

“ Sure, it’s pretty—clean—and beautifully designed for art and utility—but it isn’t civilization. You’re confusing technology with culture. You look at this and say, ‘What a great civilization man has built,’ when you really mean, ‘What a great technology mankind has developed.’ There’s all the difference in the world. Technology is of the mind and hands. Civilization is of the spirit—and spiritually we are still in the Dark Ages. ”

“ The machine, their master, is no respecter of persons and knows neither morality nor dignity nor prescriptive right, divine or human; its teaching is training them into insensibility of the whole range of concepts on which these ministrations proceed. (27*)
Not alone in the direction of growth given to vulgar sentiment and to the vulgar insight into facts is the matter-of-fact discipline of the machine technology apparent, but also in the scope and method of that scientific knowledge that has had the vogue since the advent of the machine industry. ”

“ The inertia of past pragmatics has not yet been annihilated by the dynamics of a fundamental change of direction. Still, an integrated, yet decentralized, universe of work and living has been taking shape and will continue to do so. Interconnection made possible by digital technology, first of all, opens a wide range of possibilities for reshaping social life, political institutions, and our ability to design and produce goods. Our own ability to mediate, to integrate parts and services resulting from specialized activities is supported by machines that enhance our cognitive characteristics. ”

“ Either is capable of achieving mass production, but neither insures a democratic control of industry, neither provides for growth, for education in the productive process. A democracy of industry requires a people's sustained interest in the productive enterprise; their interest in the development of technology, the development of markets, and the release of man's productive energy.
It happens that in machine production and in the division of labor there are emotional and intellectual possibilities which were non-existent in the earlier and simpler methods of production. ”

“ The pitch of squalor that characterized vulgar life in the busier Continental countries at the close of the great era of politics could probably not be reached again, but that again, is due, not to these spiritual factors of cultural growth, but to the altered state of the industrial arts. The factor in the modern situation that is alien to the ancient regime is the machine technology, with its many and wide ramifications. ”

“ You know, the way the computers you invented have changed our society, that they're founded on science and technology. How they've affected people's values." She glanced up from her plate. "I mean, really, you've democratized computing power among the masses, putting it in the hands of the people. ”

“ On the one hand, we want the machinery of the government to be all-powerful, able to do anything, and on the other hand we want the engineer, the people, to have great power so as to be able to control that all-powerful machine. ”

“ These technology cannot countenance. Liberty under law presupposes the supremacy of politics. It presupposes the possibility, for example, that political deliberation might lead to the decision to postpone the introduction of a new machine. Technology, on the other hand, asserts that what we can do is worth doing ”

“ Mankind has other dealings with the material means of life, besides those covered by the community's technological proficiency. These other dealings have to do with the use, distribution, and consumption of the goods procured by the employment of the community's technological proficiency, and are carried out under working arrangements of an institutional character,—use and wont, law and custom. The principles and practice of the distribution of wealth vary with the changes in technology and with the other cultural changes that are going forward ”

“ All 1,300 have been entered into a database which is sortable by type of transaction, type of government program, type of technology.
Technology is the promise of changing the world. It offers a possibility of not only making government better and more efficient, but fundamentally to rethink how government should work. We made enormous progress and we have set a foundation which really brings the business of government into a new century, with a whole new technology. ”

“ The extent of the machine must be decided by the extent of the want. If the want is sufficiently universal, the organization cannot avoid providing the machinery. [pg 341] This principle applies to every form of communication devised or discovered. The question of government ownership of telegraph or telephone connections becomes one of simple economy, whenever the community finds such means of communication a matter of universal want. If economy or vested rights of individuals prevent such provision, government must still guard these universal interests by inspection and control. ”

“ Although it is indisputably true that the world of technology has been profoundly affected by the discoveries of “the heroes of science,” it must first be established that the major political, social, and historical changes are functions of technological development. Without denying in the least the pervasive influence of first steam and then power on our everyday life and its problems, it still remains true that new tools and techniques implement social policy rather than determine it. ”

“ Others may note the influence of technology-an electronic eye open on the world that renders uniform everything within its range. The new dynamics of human interaction, required by our striving for higher efficiency appropriate to the scale of humankind, probably explains the process better. The similarity is determined by the mechanism we use to achieve this higher efficiency, i.e., progressively deeper labor division, increased mediation, and the need for alternative mechanisms for human integration, that is reflected in TV images. ”

“ With the transition to modern times industry comes into the foreground in the west-European scheme of life, and the institutions of European civilisation fall into a more intimate relation with the exigencies of industry and technology. The technological range of habituation progressively counts for more in the cultural complex, and the discrepancy between the technological discipline and the discipline of law and order under the institutions then in force grows progressively less. ”

“ The machines are absolutely to its existence in society today, therefore it will carry the machines with it into the new society. Functioning at the machines—conscious group effort—will be the means of life in the new society and all the social institutions of the new order will be grouped about the machines and be colored by them. The machine method of production will determine the form of the new society, and human relationships (the great Association of Happy Workingmen) will be determined by the industrial method of wealth production. ”

“ The general assumption has been that once a technology is developed to commercial stage, the market machinery will automatically lead firms to adapt and invest in the technology. But this is not happening. ”

“ I am calling upon all Americans to open themselves to the opportunities presented by the incorporation of technology into their lives and livelihoods. First, government policies should not penalize but rather improve incentives for the entrepreneurial development of new technology so critical to maintaining industrial leadership. ”

“ Power to the People by Scott Mason
The last few months have taught me, and this country, a great deal about the technology that has been allowed to control our lives. Computers, mainframes, mini computers, or millions of personal computers - they do in fact control and monitor our every activity, for better or for worse. ”

“ The heart of the technorealist approach involves a continuous critical examination of how technologies - whether cutting-edge or mundane - might help or hinder us in the struggle to improve the quality of our personal lives, our communities, and our economic, social, and political structures. ”

“ The technology which embodies the theoretical substance of this industry is a technology of workmanship, in which the salient factors are personal skill, force and diligence. Such a technology, running as it does in great part on personal initiative, capacity, and application, approaches nearer to the commonplace features of the institutional fabric than many another technological system might ”

“ We will use network-based information technology and other modern technologies to drive changes in models of production, management, and marketing, create new industry chains, supply chains, and value chains, and transform and upgrade conventional drivers, thus injecting them with new vitality.
Ultimately, it is the people who are the inexhaustible source of power that drives development. ”

“ Is there, or is there not, any possible way in which my factory with its machines can be made as human and as expressive of the human as a department store?"
This is the question that our machine civilization has set itself to answer.
All the men with good honest working imaginations, the geniuses and the freemen of the world, are setting themselves the task of answering it.
Some say, "Machines are on the necks of the men. We will take the machines away."
Others say, "We will make our men as good as our machines. We will make our inventions in men catch up with our inventions in machines." ”

“ The creative multitude is becoming legally excluded from using and reinterpreting the concepts and ideas that they collectively produce. In addition, this legal exclusion is being supported by technological means. Using technology as their delegates, the vectors seek to enforce vectoral law by instantiating their interests within the technical code that configures information, communications, networks and devices. ”

“ We have shewn how population must go on, in proportion to subsistence, and in proportion to industry: now the machine eats nothing, so does not diminish subsistence, and industry (in our age at least) is in no danger of being overstocked in any well governed state; for let all the world copy your improvements, they still will be the scholars. And if, on the contrary, in the introduction of machines you are found to be the scholars of other nations, in that case you are brought to the dilemma of accepting the invention with all its inconveniencies, or of renouncing every foreign communication. ”

“ The cultural era of Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural Religion reduced God to the rank of a "Great Artificer," and the machine technology is, in turn, relegating Him to that fringe of minor employments and those outlying industrial regions to which the handicraftsmen have been retired. ”