Science & Tech Quote by Jack Kilby

Kilby’s sentence is a master class in scientist-speak: cautious, compact, and quietly combative. “It’s very dangerous to project” opens with a ritual disclaimer, the kind that signals seriousness while also granting permission to speculate. He’s not rejecting prediction; he’s naming the professional taboo around it. In labs and boardrooms, forecasting can read as arrogance or marketing. Kilby frames himself as the sober engineer who knows the costs of hype.

Then he pivots: “but it’s clear.” That “but” is the tell. After disarming you with humility, he reasserts authority. The subtext is: I won’t pretend I can see the far future, yet I can see the immediate trajectory because I understand the physics, the manufacturing, the failure modes. “Existing technology” is doing double duty. It gestures at the dominant platform of the moment (incremental improvements, scaling, refinement) while implicitly contrasting it with whatever “next thing” people were already selling. His point isn’t that breakthroughs won’t happen; it’s that the current paradigm isn’t exhausted.

The phrase “some more years to go” carries a strategic patience that’s both technical and cultural. It pushes back against the recurring myth that innovation arrives only as abrupt revolution. Kilby, a key figure in the integrated circuit’s birth, is effectively defending evolution: progress as iteration, yield improvements, tooling, and engineering discipline. It’s a reminder that the future often looks less like a lightning bolt than a long, expensive, relentlessly optimized runway.