Quotes About Computers

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.

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.

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

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.

With both people and computers on the job, computer error can be more quickly tracked down and corrected by people and, conversely, human error can be more quickly corrected by computers. What it amounts to is that nothing serious can happen unless human error and computer error take place simultaneously. And that hardly ever happens.

It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

It doesn't matter how many televisions and computers and pieces of stereo equipment the Chinese send to us, even if they're sending them to us only in return for some funny, little, green pieces of paper. That is a balanced trade. They got what they wanted: the green pieces of paper. We got what we wanted: the plush toys, the computers, the stereo components.

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

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

Computers show up everywhere except the growth statistics.

I'm not really gadget oriented. I'm not into technology or computers. I'm not good at interfacing with that sort of gear.

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.

The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesnt teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.

This is what I call the "cosmological problem" of science. Science has the instrumental function that has given us computers and so on, but its cosmological function is to give us a picture of the world we inhabit as human beings, and on that level it's failing a vast number of people.

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.

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

Silicon Valley, after all, feeds off the existence of computers, the internet, the IT systems, satellites, the whole of micro electronics and so on, but a lot of that comes straight out of the state sector of the economy. Silicon Valley developed, but they expanded and turned it into commercial products and so on, but the innovation is on the basis of fundamental technological development that took places in places like this [MIT] on government funding, and that continues.

Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is notas efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.

We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often "crash" when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I'm sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for "productivity"

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.

We'll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell.

If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but . . .to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel.

[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?

Computers are everywhere and you can't even begin to function with a computer unless you have comprehension and an understanding of the English language.

You have riches and freedom here but I feel no sense of faith or direction. You have so many computers, why don't you use them in the search for love?

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.

I don't look at computers as opponents. For me it is much more interesting to beat humans.

The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.

Think about it. Right now, a whole generation of young (customers) in the United States has been brought up to take computers for granted. Pointing a mouse is no more mysterious to them than hitting the "on" button on the television is to their parents.

I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.

There's all these ways to instantly communicate - cars, computers, telephone and transportation - and even with all that, it's so hard to find people and have an honest communication with them.

We have an epidemic of sexual predators following our children, whether it be on the computers, whether it be in our public parks, whether it be in the workplace, or even our schools.

We can open up our computers and Skype with someone, and we see them. It's like looking through a window. And we can surf the internet through our phones, and it's like our consciousness is far away. Or we can step through a airplane door and be in another continent a few hours away. So technology feels, to me, like the doors sort of already exist, at least emotionally.

Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.

Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

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.

No amount of outer technology, no amount of computers and biotechnology and nanotechnology is going to stop the continuation of warfare and racism and environmental destruction. What's called for on the Earth at this time is really a change of heart ... the question is really not the future of humanity, but the presence of eternity.

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

I had one typewriter for 50 years, but I have bought seven computers in six years. I suppose that's why Bill Gates is rich, and Underwood is out of business.

And then computers got to a point where you could just record directly into them. So when that happened, funny enough, I thought, Right, I'm going to learn how to do this because then I can understand that part.

I'm not massively into computers. I'm a fan of Macs because they're more user friendly, so I'm used to using them.

By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.

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.

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.