Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.

Alan Kay, a pioneering computer scientist associated with Xerox PARC and the development of object-oriented programming and the graphical user interface, is often quoted making this wry observation in discussions about how people perceive “technology.” The remark reflects a late-20th-century computing culture in which rapid innovation made yesterday’s breakthroughs feel quickly “normal,” while newer inventions were treated as disruptive or alien. Kay used the line to highlight a generational and psychological bias: what we grow up with becomes part of the background of everyday life, while later inventions get labeled as “technology” in a way that implies novelty, complexity, or even threat.

The quote reframes “technology” as a relative category rather than an absolute one. Kay suggests that people often mistake familiarity for naturalness: tools and systems present from childhood (electric lights, cars, television, the internet for later generations) fade into the assumed order of things, while newer tools are singled out as “technology.” The line critiques how this bias shapes public debates—new media, computing, or AI can be treated as exceptional or suspect, even though older infrastructures were equally transformative in their time. Implicitly, it encourages historical perspective and humility about what counts as “normal.”