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A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort.

— B. F. Skinner Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (1978)

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Technology

More quotes by B. F. Skinner

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much (1993)

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (1969)

Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.

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We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: B. F. Skinner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.