Quotes About Computers

I think that having been around computers all my life - my father had brought home personal computers at a very early age in the '70s - so being around computers from a very early age perhaps I had even subconsciously seen the exponential progression of what was happening with computers.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write-words.

It took me thirty-six years; and, in some fifty stories, ranging in length from short-shorts to novels, I think I must have touched, in one way or another, on every aspect of computers and computerization. And (mark this!) I did it without ever knowing anything at all about computers in any real sense. To this day, I don't. I am totally inept with machinery... on my typewriter I turn out books at the contemptible rate of one a month

Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

The idea of having more technology solving this idea of hyperactive lifestyle is not really the mainstream problem. I think the real innovation that’s going to be rewarded will be on things like, let’s convert our computers from being tools to being companions. Let’s convert our computers from being utilitarian to being enlightening. These are human needs.

I have a son. He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable.But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that's true throughout our whole governmental society.

The idea that so many kids eat rubbish and sit on computers all day long appals me and getting them into sport is a major way of getting them off computers and leading healthier lives.

While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the decreasing cogency of public debate, computers dismiss linear argument and promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling.

I was always interested in technology. When personal computers came out, I was one of the first to pick one up and begin playing with it. My hobbies tend to be not about going fishing or hiking, but about playing on machines. Just like some people like helicopters and tanks and cars, I like technology a lot.

Microsoft has changed the way people think about computers.

My monetary studies have led me to the conclusion that central banks could profitably be replaced by computers geared to provide a steady rate of growth in the quantity of money. Fortunately for me personally, and for a select group of fellow economists, that conclusion has had no practical impact… else there would have been no Central Bank of Sweden to have established the award [Nobel Prize] I am honoured to receive.

What a lot of people don't know, because in a lot of TV and movies, they have a lot of men talking about computers - it was a woman who invented the first compiler!

I'm bullish on writing. Movies, radio, television, and now digital media - everything was supposed to push us away from text, to video or "back" to speech. First, there's no going back. We're always stumbling forward. Second, writing is invincible. Thirty years ago, we thought we'd all be talking to our computers; instead, we're all typing on our phones.

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.

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.

I guarantee you, yoga will compete with computers, music, sports, automobiles, the drug industry. Yoga will take over the world!

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

The criminal justice system - although this applies less to the U.S., where rehabilitation is not seen as a valuable contribution to criminal justice - in Europe where rehab is supposed to be integral, we have no way of rehabilitating skilled hackers. On the contrary what we do is we demonize them and continue to do so after they come out of jail because we restrict their access to computers by law. Crazy world, crazy people.

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

What would the world be like if you had to develop a power yourself before you could use it? Just as a silly example: How would the comment section on YouTube change if, to use it, you had to have the schooling necessary to have a basic understanding of how computers and the internet work? More seriously, would anyone smart enough to know how to design and build a tank, or a laser guided anti-aircraft missile, or a computer and video editing software be stupid enough to join ISIS? In fact, if such knowledge was required—would it even be possible for there to be standing armies?

I don't get how people want to read books on computers because it must be really bad for your eyes, for starters. I love the smell of books and I just like the whole experience of it. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I like that whole experience - it's the same as I like putting on a record or a CD and waiting for it to arrive or buying it and waiting to listen to it in full.

Similarly, computer literacy courses tend to produce computer people who know a lot about computers or a piece of software but they don't help people become fluent with the machine.

We live in an age now where people go to the movies and, even the biggest movies are in the theaters six, eight weeks and then gone. And then for the rest of time now people are watching them on their phones, or computers, or TVs. And that's how the films gonna live.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we've learned about them.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.

Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.

Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.

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

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.

You really feel like you're on the cutting edge and you know you are because all the camera equipment you take for granted doesn't exist for 3-D. So all the cranes with all the stabilized heads, they don't work on 3-D because they're all built for lightweight camera packages. As soon as you kind of put two cameras together and all the other crap that they need and the cabling to go back to the computers, we've literally, the cranes on these movies, they break after a couple of days.

I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

Computers are like horses; they can sense fear and will act based on that.

I'm not very technically minded. I mean, I don't know how to do e-mail on computers.

I know so many people who actually just watch television on their computers now and don't even really watch their TV anymore.

There's what I'll call best practices and then there's reality. Based on our research over the past two to three years, there are significant differences in performance results that companies are experiencing with their security programs. There are some common things that are done very well among the best-class enterprises suffering the least amount of breaches and damages. But even having said that, there's probably no way to defeat a serious security threat today and it wouldn't matter what the tool is. The only way to do that would be to unplug the computers.

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.

Memory has always been social. Now we're using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.

I tell adults about the experiences of more than a hundred teachers I've interviewed. They tell me that allowing the child to help them learn helped them become better teachers. That's because they no longer had to pretend they were the experts - not only about computers but about other things.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

Without computers we will be stuck only proving theorems that have short proofs.

Arimaa's a better game than I thought. It follows a fairly sound approach to making the game difficult for computers.

Ultimately, I consider people to be more important than computers.

The key is to let computers do what they are good at, which is trawling these massive data sets for something that is mathematically odd. And that makes it easier for humans to do what they are good at - explaining those anomalies.