You can always count on folks in the technology business for pearls of wisdom and vision, occasional wit and, thankfully for the press, frequent bouts of foot-in-mouth disease. Here are some random quotes that stuck with us — random, that is, because they’re all we could think of toward the end of a weird, exhausting year when the U.S. president seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room:

Social (media) destruction

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works” – Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook executive

“Facebook has made tremendous strides in coming to terms with its unforeseen influence and, more so than any of its peers, the team there has taken real steps to course correct.” – Chamath Palihapitiya, four days later

“What Russia understands is … the most embryo state of the narrative is the meme. Control the meme, control the idea. If you control the idea, you control the belief system. Control the belief system, you control the narrative. Control the narrative, you control the population” – James Scott, co-founder, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

Promises, promises

“Let me make this as clear as I can. I am fully committed to HPE and plan to remain the company’s CEO…. I am not going anywhere” – Meg Whitman, four months before stepping down.

Tech’s man problem

“When I gave birth to my first child, some partners at work treated my taking maternity leave as the equivalent of abandoning a ship in the middle of a typhoon to get a manicure” – Ellen Pao, on working at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

“If she were an ugly man, she’d be a hero” – Martha Josephson, a senior partner at the recruiting firm Egon Zehnder, on Marissa Mayer’s tenure as CEO of Yahoo, during which its stock rose from $15.65 to $50.60

“It’s hard to promote a book right now because all of the people who are supposed to interview me keep getting outed for sexual misconduct” – virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier

IT everywhere

“Cloud is a model, not a place” – Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware

“Mother Nature figured out packet switching 3.5 billion years ago” – Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf on why he would go into microbiology if he were starting his career today

“The enterprise data center is an artisan, handcrafted special snowflake” – Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Chris Wright

Rage against the machines

“HAL killing humans was not a bug, but an alternative feature” – IBM Watson Chief Scientist Grady Booch

“Artificial emotion will be far more worrisome than artificial intelligence” – Andra Keay, managing director of Silicon Valley Robotics

“What a bulldozer was to physical labor, AI is to data” – Naveen Rao, general manager of Intel Corp.’s Artificial Intelligence Products Group 

“Machine learning is 20 percent fun and 80 percent elbow grease” – Dinesh Nirmal, vice president at IBM Corp.

“It’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries” – Ed Rensi, former CEO of McDonald’s

IP-nO

“I’d rather just buy a bell and ring it at home” – Tanium Inc. Chief Executive Orion Hindawi, when asked about when his company might go public

Blockchained

“Changed my name to ‘Blocky McBlockchain’ on LinkedIn and [got] 764,289 recruiter contacts in one day” – Bryan Beal on Twitter

With Paul Gillin, James Farrell, Mark Albertson and Jeff Frick

Image: OpenClipart-Vectors/Pixabay