Hal > Hal's Quotes

“there’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However, there’s never been a worse time to be a worker with only ‘ordinary’ skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots, and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The monks explain that they have been sent by “the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things,” the pope, to bring the “venerable word / of the One Sole True God” to New Spain. By worshipping at false altars, the friars say, “you cause Him an injured heart, / by which you live in His anger, His ire.” So infuriated was the Christian God by the Indians’ worship of idols and demons that he sent out “the Spaniards, / … those who afflicted you with tormenting sorrow, / by which you were punished / so that you ceased / these not few injuries to His precious heart.” The Triple Alliance was subjugated, in other words, because its people had failed to recognize the One True God. By accepting the Bible, the priests explain, the Mexica “will be able to cool the heart / of He by Whom All Live, / so He will not completely destroy you.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Monte Albán is today a decorous sprawl of walls and pyramids enveloped by a lush lawn (this last is an import from Europe; lawn grass did not exist in the Americas prior to Columbus).”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“The experience of the Mayas is one more reminder that any interpretation of human evolution based on the idea of unilineal progress forwards (or upwards) is an illusion. Peoples decline as well as rise.”
― Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Cortés, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico

“In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created