Quotes About Computers

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.

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

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.

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.

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.

One of the big challenges I've thought about in making record is that the role of computers has become so inescapable and computers offer so many possibilities for creativity, but they also make you lazy.

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 don't understand computers. I don't even understand people who understand 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.

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.

I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.

Corporations can deduct their planes, all their office expenses, their machinery, their computers and Teleprompters and whatever else they have. They can deduct their yachts, they can deduct their limousines, their planes, everything.

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

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.

I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world. They're just sitting there. I can hit them with a two by four.

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

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

Marketing isn't done by computers, it's done by people. And people who sense opportunity and have the confidence to be remarkable will always defeat defensive actions by people who have given up.

Why is it that I notice so many brilliant scientists using Macs for their personal computers; why does the Lawrence Livermore & Berkeley Labs buy millions of dollars worth of Macs?

Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.

...what threatens us today in the world of computers and other invasions of privacy is not a national ID card but a number of other things.

That's what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the, 'Oh, somebody coughed in the background; we need to take that out' - or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.

I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.

When Colin Powell showed up as Secretary of State in 2001, most State Department employees still didn't even have computers on their desks. When I got there they were not mostly permitted to have handheld devices. I mean, so you're thinking how do we operate in this new environment dominated by technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I can't expect people to change if I don't try to model it and lead it.

These days, young people watch TV on smartphones and computers. Young people with an actual TV set are harder to find than a picture of Anthony Weiner with his clothes on.

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

Our experience using computers reflects a trade-off that was made fifty years ago or more.

Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better.

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 happen to think that computers are the most important thing to happen to musicians since the invention of cat-gut which was a long time ago.

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

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.

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

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago.

China has legally purchased high performance computers, advanced machine tools, and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment from several American companies.

Evolution is the only thing that exists through time. That is true for computers, or people, or a business. We tend to see things in a static way, and so you see what is. Even in looking at ourselves, what we really are is essentially vessels for our DNA that keeps evolving through time. So seeing that and embracing that reality, and thinking of everything as kind of this perpetual motion machine in which you embrace reality - you don't wish it was different. You realize that it's your puzzle to interact with. You interact with it well, you evolve yourself.

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.

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 told you, computers are like women. If you shout at them or ask them to do too many things at once, they shut down and you won't even get a sniff" pg. 4

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

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.

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.

I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist.

We are the greatest computers in this world, but now we've created the smart phone which is smarter than us now, but we're still making dumb decisions. We have given our creations more power than we have, and that to me is dumb.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

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

I am the person I want to be. I got to teach and had some of the greatest times in my life learning that I had some teaching skills and doing some incredible things teaching 200 hours of computers a year to fifth graders, making them experts at certain things.