With each technological ‘revolution’, more energies began to be accessed, stored, and used than had been in the preceding epoch…On the whole, technological change is irreversible: whatever the nature of a technological revolution, it is always from the hoe to the plough, and not the other way around…Improvement generally means greater efficiency in the use of energy, materials, or information. It means greater speed, less investment of time and money, and operation on a larger scale.

Technology does not always equal progress.

Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again. [...] As each new technology matures, customers are no longer happy with the flashy promises of the technology but instead demand understandable and workable designs. Slowly the manufacturers relearn the same basic principles and apply them to their products. The most egregious failures always come from the developers of the most recent technologies.

Where in the world did the idea come from that things left to themselves can improve with time? Who would start a crazy idea like that? This idea is the opposite of everything that we observe in the world today. For instance, all the highways in our nation today left to themselves decay, deteriorate, and fall apart. A house left to itself will become a wreck. It takes work and constant planning to make anything improve. Everything tends toward disorder.

In every age everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; nobody seems to reckon on any improvement in the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point – that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason. ... On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Technology has not advanced because people are starved for instruments to make a better civilization, but because they are starved for entertainment – technology is still mostly a toy factory for grown-ups.

Technological progress is a race between increasing the consciousness of civilization and the destructive power available to an individual.

If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.

The advance in knowledge and useful new factors based on such knowledge are all too frequently put aside as if they were not produced means of production but instead simply happened to occur over time. This view is as a rule implicit in the notion of technological change.

Testing does not improve a product; the improving is done by people fixing the bugs that testing has uncovered.

It seems like the better it gets, the more miserable people become. There’s never a technological advancement where people think, “Wow, we can finally do this!” … And I think a lot of it has to do with advertising. Americans have it constantly drilled into our heads, every fucking day, that we deserve everything to be perfect all the time.

We tend to think of technological progress as an ever accelerating affair, but it just isn't so.

"In solving problems, technology creates new problems, and we seem, as in Through the Looking-Glass, to have to keep running faster and faster to stay where we are. The question is then whether technical progress actually "gets anywhere" in the sense of increasing the delight and happiness of life."

A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.