Quotes About Computers

Run for your lives-the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces. As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us. In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won't dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.

We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe.

Computers are scary. Theyre nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.

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.

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.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.

Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal.

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

I am very bad at computers. I don't really know how to write email.

Microsoft has changed the way people think about computers.

I don't even have cable anymore, or a television. I just watch on computers. It's clearly the future of where we're heading.

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

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

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.

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.

Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.

The fastest thing computers do is go obsolete.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.

College just didn't even have computers for an under-curriculum when I started college.

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

Chess computers do not sweat during time pressure and commit costly blunders. Furthermore, the strength of these programs (over and above their faultless recall processes) lies in their capacity to make relatively superficial tactical decisions with incredible speed. Positional values, long-range strategy, aesthetic judgment, and political astuteness remain staples of human performance, man vs. machine results in the foreseeable future to the contrary not withstanding.

It would be in pretty poor form for me to not be a big supporter of tech and computers because that is how I do my work and how I got involved. The advancement and the affordability of tech gear has made a level playing field where you can now have access to ideas reasonably and then it just comes down to extracting those ideas, which is great.

[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.

So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of 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.

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

The fact that the infrastructure is falling apart is not necessarily because it's built poorly. The New York City subways were built in 1903. The fact that they're still running at all is an enormous success. The fact that New York City's bridges have held up as long as they have is extraordinary, and the engineers didn't have computers to tell them about tolerance. They overbuilt these things - traffic on them is like an ant on an elephant.

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

Computers and games don't waste time - people do.

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?

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.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

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.

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.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.

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.

People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding. You put them together, and bang!

There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

Some miners would have 20 pints after a hard day in the mine. Now that we sit behind computers all day, this is down to 18 or 19 pints.

It's amazing to me that we let humans drive cars... It's a bug that cars were invented before computers.

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.

I think there's no way they should have to teach [math] now. We have computers. We no longer need to know why 3x = 2y/4.