"Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy"
About this Quote
A line like this only “sounds” like Bill Gates if you remember the era when Microsoft could plausibly be cast as both benefactor and bully: the 1990s, when software stopped being a tool and started feeling like an operating system for modern life. Framed as a businessman’s provocation, it’s less prophecy than power flex dressed up as Darwinism. “Evolution” is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting: it launders corporate choice into natural law, implying that resistance isn’t principled, just doomed.
The first jab - “Since when…about what people want?” - is a deliberately inverted customer-service slogan. It mocks the idea that users are sovereign, positioning design not as listening but as steering: you don’t ask the market what it wants, you teach it what it needs. That’s the classic platform strategy in a sentence, and it carries the smug confidence of a company that’s already won distribution.
Then the imagery turns almost comic-book authoritarian: “every knee will bow” to a “silicon fist,” pleading to “binary gods.” It’s biblical cadence welded to tech materialism, painting computation as a new religion and hardware as its blunt instrument. The subtext is anxiety disguised as triumph: if software is inevitable, then the people building it can pretend they’re not accountable for its consequences.
Whether or not Gates actually said it, the quote captures a real cultural mood: late-20th-century tech as destiny, not debate. The punch lands because it exaggerates what users already feared - that convenience would become dependence, and dependence would look a lot like worship.
The first jab - “Since when…about what people want?” - is a deliberately inverted customer-service slogan. It mocks the idea that users are sovereign, positioning design not as listening but as steering: you don’t ask the market what it wants, you teach it what it needs. That’s the classic platform strategy in a sentence, and it carries the smug confidence of a company that’s already won distribution.
Then the imagery turns almost comic-book authoritarian: “every knee will bow” to a “silicon fist,” pleading to “binary gods.” It’s biblical cadence welded to tech materialism, painting computation as a new religion and hardware as its blunt instrument. The subtext is anxiety disguised as triumph: if software is inevitable, then the people building it can pretend they’re not accountable for its consequences.
Whether or not Gates actually said it, the quote captures a real cultural mood: late-20th-century tech as destiny, not debate. The punch lands because it exaggerates what users already feared - that convenience would become dependence, and dependence would look a lot like worship.
Quote Details
| Topic | Artificial Intelligence |
|---|
More Quotes by Bill
Add to List




