Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
Interpretation
New inventions are often celebrated initially but may later cause anxiety and concern.
Bertolt Brecht's quote reflects the dual nature of technological advancements, where the initial excitement over innovation quickly shifts to apprehension about its consequences. This highlights the complex relationship society has with progress, depicting how inventions can simultaneously inspire hope and invoke fear regarding their impact on life and thought.
In practice
During a technology conference, a speaker might quote this to discuss the societal impacts of artificial intelligence.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
Today, the smartphone in your pocket has a high-quality digital camera. Everyone - not just artists - is a photographer, and the explosion of photos taken annually proves it.
Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.
With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, 'Oh, let's build a robot' and what's the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That's so 1950s. We are so past that.
Any competent programmer has an API to cash, payments, escrow, wills, notaries, lotteries, dividends, micropayments, subscriptions, crowdfunding, and more.
The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)
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