Science & Tech Quote by Gijs de Vries

De Vries isn’t marveling at progress here; he’s issuing a bureaucrat’s warning wrapped in inevitability. By declaring he’s “never come across a technology that doesn’t change,” he shifts technological churn from a management problem into a law of nature. That rhetorical move matters: if change is inevitable, then resistance stops looking principled and starts looking negligent.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “You have to adapt your systems” is pitched as common sense, but the subtext is institutional discipline. Politicians rarely control innovation itself; what they can control is the apparatus around it: procurement rules, data standards, security protocols, staffing, and the workflows that make agencies legible to citizens. “Systems” also smuggles in more than IT. It signals the surrounding machinery of governance: regulation, oversight, accountability, and the habits of a civil service built to reduce risk, not chase novelty.

Contextually, this lands in the post-1990s reality that governments and public institutions are perpetually catching up to tools designed in the private sector, then deployed at societal scale: the internet’s rapid iteration, mobile platforms, surveillance tech, and now AI. De Vries is trying to pre-empt the familiar cycle of public-sector lag: legacy systems becoming expensive liabilities, security holes turning into scandals, and modernization arriving only after crisis.

The line’s quiet bite is that “adapt” isn’t optional, but it’s also not neutral. Adapting systems means choosing what values get encoded in the upgrade: efficiency vs. due process, innovation vs. transparency, convenience vs. rights. The inevitability argument doesn’t erase politics; it just changes where the political fight happens.