We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
Interpretation
Bezos highlights the current limitations and primitive state of the Internet compared to its potential.
In this quote, Jeff Bezos compares the state of the Internet to the early days of technology, specifically referencing the 1908 Hurley washing machine. He suggests that, despite the advancements we've made, we are still operating at a rudimentary level with much inefficient and problematic technology that hampers our progress, emphasizing the need for further innovation and improvement in the digital landscape.
In practice
In a tech conference, discussing the future of digital innovation.
We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Work hard, have fun and make history.
If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.
We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.
You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
Our new technologies, combined with our numbers, have made us, collectively, a force of nature
The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.
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