Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It's just always all in the way you use it. So there's no - you can't really blame anything on the technology. It's just the way people use it, and it always has been.
Interpretation
Technology and science hold potential risks, but the responsibility lies in how they are utilized by people.
In this quote, Steve Martin emphasizes that while technology and science come with inherent risks and challenges, the true issue lies not in the tools themselves but in the human choices surrounding their use. It highlights the importance of responsibility and ethics in the application of technology, reinforcing that accountability cannot be shifted solely to the innovations we create.
In practice
In a seminar discussing the impact of technology on society, this quote can remind participants of the importance of responsible usage.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.
I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.
...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
Reviews for someone like me come in three packages. One is justifiable praise, the second is justifiable criticism, and the third is, "This is only published because he's a celebrity."
If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.
Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
I don't think in today's world you can go too far. However you may feel about social media or the Internet or selfies, it's part of how we all live today. 'Vogue' needs to understand and reflect that.
More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
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