Quotes About Computers

Eventually, we need to have computers that work differently from the way they do today and have for the past 60-plus years. We're capturing and generating increasingly massive amounts of data, but we can't make computers that keep up with it. One of the most promising solutions is to make computers that work more the way brains work.

Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.

I take computers practically apart and put them back together. I have a supercomputer I built over the years out of different computers.

Without computers, the government would be unable to function at the level of effectiveness and efficiency that we have come to expect. . . . Today's government uses computers which are capable of cranking out millions of documents per day without any regard whatsoever for their content, thereby freeing government employees for more important responsibilities, such as not answering their phones.

One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible

Because I believe that humans are computers, I conjectured that computers, like people, can have left- and right-handed versions.

I started getting into Internet technologies and computers. I wasn't especially interested in being a musician, but I wound up finding my way back to being interested in music through computers.

Computers are only capable of a certain kind of randomness because computers are finite devices.

The future lies in designing and selling computers that people don't realize are computers at all.

There has been a great proliferation of lawyers in the pat 20 years, just as there has been a proliferation of computers. But unlike computers, lawyers do not get twice as intelligent and half as expensive every two years.

I think computers have changed things tremendously. At one time, you tended to take the rough with the smooth. But now, because you can go back and stop and start, and have a limitless amount of tracks if anything looks remotely good, we keep it. You've got to go through the agony of sounding very human at first, and then you work on it with the aid of technology. Computers have revolutionized things in many ways allowing me to work to a standard I could have only joked about fourty years ago.

Microsoft has changed the way people think about computers.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Computers don't seem real to me because there's a sheet of glass between you and whatever is happening.

I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.

I know few significant questions of public policy which can safely be confided to computers. In the end, the hard decisions inescapably involve imponderables of intuition, prudence, and judgment.

Computers are another tool for the creative artist - just as a flat or filbert brush is. But there was a time when I left a jar of medium open by my work station for that painterly smell.

So I think things are going to get closer and closer to each other, because the screens will force that to happen. I think there are a lot of movies that people will only see on their computers or their iPods.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

I went and I started teaching computers to young kids, to fifth graders at first, later to sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth graders. I also started teaching teachers. And that was back in the days when we'd wire up the labs ourselves and crimp on the Ethernet connectors and then we would.

Computers are no more able to create information than iPods are capable of creating music.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions.

A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.”

Video games and computers have become babysitters for kids.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

Modern people are only willing to believe in their computers, while I believe in myself.

My e-mail address is actually my wife's e-mail address. I actually hate computers.

If self-driving cars are going to work - they're being tested now, as you know - the computers that drive them have to have lots of practice before they're allowed to get out in a real car on the roads.

OK Computer? More like No Thank You Computers. They killed my father, and I hate them.

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.

The cool kids have co-opted all the neat stuff ? computers, gadgets, video games. Theres no such thing as a computer geek anymore.

Regardless of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

We have the ability, at such high fidelity, to simulate the physical world through computers. But when the spiritual world or human behavior comes into play, we don't have a very good model for that at all.

So when you do board, the first class people, they're sitting there. A lot of them are working as your boarding. They have computers out and calculators. They're looking up at you like, Hey, we're making money right now!

I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.

I've been working in computer animation for 25 years. I'm obviously a devotee of the technology. I just think it's the one aspect of the medium that's going to continue to revolutionize the filmmaking. It's constantly changing and it's constantly opening up new possibilities. The technology is evolving where 2-D animation was ultimately limited by how long you could pay how many people to make a movie. I mean computers, not that it's in anyway a labor saving device, but it promises to open up exciting new technical possibilites.

My whole life had been designing computers I could never build.

In the summer of 1988, I received an interesting call from Bill Gates at Microsoft. He asked whether I'd like to come over and talk about building a new operating system at Microsoft for personal computers. What Bill had to offer was the opportunity to build another operating system, one that was portable.

Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?

I have some rhythms on my computers, that are actually called "trance", they go from 1-30 or 40. They're grooves that come on the synth. If I could somehow use them, I would.

We invented our computers in the '80s. We networked them together in the '90s. Now we're giving them eyes, ears and sensory organs. And we're asking them to observe and manipulate the world on our behalf.

Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

Access to computers and the Internet has become a basic need for education in our society.

People have been trying to do kind of natural language processing with computers for decades and there has only been sort of slow progress in that in general. It turned out the problem we had to solve is sort of the reverse of the problem people usually have to solve. People usually have to solve the problem of you're given you know thousands, millions of pages of text, go have the computer understand this.

The roots of apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn't need another dell or compaq.

Computers in classrooms are the filmstrips of the 1990s.