Science & Tech Quote by Esther Dyson

Dyson is doing something quietly radical here: demoting technology from protagonist to supporting actor. The phrasing is almost parental in its insistence, but the target isn’t just gadget-happy consumers. It’s builders, executives, and policymakers who’ve been trained to treat novelty as strategy. “Don’t leave hold of your common sense” reads like a grip-your-own-wrist warning: in the rush to digitize, people outsource judgment to whatever is newest, fastest, or most “AI-powered,” then call the resulting confusion progress.

The intent is practical, but the subtext is moral. Dyson is reminding us that tools inherit the ethics of their use, and “use” begins with the boring questions: What problem are you solving? Who benefits? Who absorbs the risk? When she says “Think about what you’re doing,” she’s pulling attention back to human agency, where accountability lives. When she adds “how the technology can enhance it,” she frames tech as amplification, not alchemy. Enhancement implies there’s already a coherent activity worth strengthening; it rejects the fantasy that tech can rescue a broken plan or replace a missing purpose.

Context matters: Dyson’s career sits at the intersection of Silicon Valley optimism and its recurring hangovers. Her line reads like an antidote to the cycle of hype-and-regret that has followed everything from social media to crypto to algorithmic decision-making. “Don’t think about technology first” is a rebuke to the pitch deck mindset: start with a product, then go hunting for a problem. Dyson insists the order of operations is the whole game.