Quotes About 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.

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.

We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.

I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat...One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies...that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire.

We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them.

There is a tendency to throw computers at third world problems, which I think is often a distraction. Putting computers in the schools is great, but it may be more important to put teachers in the schools.

We will learn that computers, amazing as they are, still cannot come close to being as effective as human beings. A computer isn't creative on its own because it is programmed to behave in a predictable way. Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers.

With thought comprising a non-computational element, computers can never do what we human beings can.

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

I love computers. I love writing on them. I love gadgetry. The thing is: I am a slow reader. So, if I am going to get my work done, I read, like, a newspaper and that's it. If I got into websites and the internet, I wouldn't get any work done.

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!

Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk.

I think the draw quotient has always been high in world championship matches because the amount of effort people put into neutralizing each other's openings. It's just now with computers that it has reached a new level.

... there's one of the great lies of all times, that computers save time. They don't. They're time suckers. So, I'm trying not to get involved in the Photoshop.

About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

Intel's Pentium III processor operating at 1 GHz is the highest performance microprocessor for PCs, enabling Intel's customers to ship the fastest personal computers in the world.

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.

If I had not studied music, there would be no Macintosh computers today.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled only by solar energy, let no one claim that it is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air-conditioning systems or computers, etc. This project voices our conviction that a pioneering spirit with political vision can together change society and and reduce society's dependence on fossil energies.

I look like a geeky hacker but I don’t know anything about computers.

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.

I went - I had designed - in high school designed hundreds and hundreds of computers over and over and over, so I developed these skills without ever thinking I'd do it in life as job.

Interactive computers and software will, I think, provide a less costly method of doing some kinds of inquiry, in knowledge acquisition and even reasoning and interaction.

Almost every profession I look at where you require human labor or you require intelligence, I see computers being able to do better than us within the next 10 years. I'm talking about a mass replacement of humans with artificial intelligence and robots.

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

Computers force us into creating with our minds and prevent us from making things with our hands. They dull the skills we use in everyday life.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.

I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid.

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

Man should rule with computers, not vice versa.

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.

Computers are the central access; information processing based on a spiral network, similar to that which is the chaos of existence itself, the analysis of systems, the interlocking lokas.

A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.

The insight at the root of artificial intelligence was that these "bits" (manipulated by computers) could just as well stand as symbols for concepts that the machine would combine by the strict rules of logic or the looser associations of psychology.

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

We've done this before in other worlds, in other lives. It is our strength, law, medicine, entertainment, and computers, the networking of energy. All of these are arts.

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

In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, 'That was the Internet Age.' And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

Comic books aren't nerdy. You'd have to be an idiot to think computers are nerdy.

When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they'd use their computer.

Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.

If chess is a vast jungle, computers are the chainsaws in a giant environmentally insensitive logging company.

To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.