Quotes about Computers

I feel I’m opening a portal to an abstract world of pixels and algorithms. My artwork is a message of peace and love from this machine world to humanity.

Technology is only one of many forces driving human history, and seldom the most important.  Politics and religion, economics and ideology, military and cultural rivalries are at least as important as technology.  Technology only gives us tools.  Human desires and institutions decide how we use them.

I think one of the things that was useful to me was not really college, but just reading books and studying how major consumer innovations took place. If you look back at the history of the telephone a century earlier, it took decades before it was common. Initially people said, "Why would I ever need a phone? If I want to talk to somebody I'll just go next door and talk to them." You couldn't imagine that people would have phones. So eventually, after many years, maybe there was a phone in the bar in town. If you had to make a call to somebody, you'd go to that one phone and enter a party line, a shared line, and so forth. Eventually, it got to the point where people did say, "You know, you do need a phone in your home!" By the time I was growing up everybody had a phone in their home. Today they have multiple phones in their homes and cell phones and computer access with instant messaging.

Ultimately, Leibniz argued, there are only two absolutely simple concepts, God and Nothingness. From these, all other concepts may be constructed, the world, and everything within it, arising from some primordial argument between the deity and nothing whatsoever. And then, by some inscrutable incandescent insight, Leibniz came to see that what is crucial in what he had written is the alternation between God and Nothingness. And for this, the numbers 0 and 1 suffice.

There are only 10 types of people in the world: people who understand binary and people who don't.

Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Describing one competitive advantage of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. It has no fear.

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft . . . and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.

Under the [Communications Decency Act], a parent allowing her 17 year old to use the family computer to obtain information on the Internet that she, in her parental judgment, deems appropriate could face a lengthy prison term. . . . Similarly, a parent who sent his 17 year old college freshman information on birth control via e mail could be incarcerated even though neither he, his child, nor anyone in their home community, found the material "indecent" or "patently offensive," if the college town's community thought otherwise. The breadth of this content based restriction of speech imposes an especially heavy burden on the Government to explain why a less restrictive provision would not be as effective as the CDA. It has not done so.

The breadth of the [Communications Decency Act's] coverage is wholly unprecedented.... The scope of the CDA is not limited to commercial speech or commercial entities. Its open ended prohibitions embrace all nonprofit entities and individuals posting indecent messages or displaying them on their own computers in the presence of minors. The general, undefined terms "indecent" and "patently offensive" cover large amounts of nonpornographic material with serious educational or other value.

Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw.

Murphy would have loved computers.

At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.

If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it with a computer.

Computers are stupid - they do exactly what you tell them to do.

One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

Don't anthropomorphize computers. They don't like it.

Computers will not be perfected until they can compute how much more than the estimate the job will cost.

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up.

As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing. .

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1-1/2 tons.

Never let a computer know you're in a hurry.

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee - that will do them in.

To err is human and to blame it on a computer is even more so.

In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it.

I think there's a world market for about five computers. Quoted by Charles Hard Townes In Martin Moskovits (Ed.), Science and Society, the John C. Polanyi Nobel Lareates Lectures, Anansi Press, Concord, Ontario, 1995, p 8.

There is a central myth about British science and economic growth, and it goes like this: science breeds wealth, Britain is in economic decline, therefore Britain has not done enough science. Actually, it is easy to show that a key cause of Britain's economic decline has been that the government has funded too much science. . . . Post-war British science policy illustrates the folly of wasting money on research. The government decided, as it surveyed the ruins of war-torn Europe in 1945, that the future lay in computers, nuclear power and jet aircraft, so successive administrations poured money into these projects-to vast technical success. The world's first commercial mainframe computer was British, sold by Ferrranti in 1951; the world's first commercial jet aircraft was British, the Comet, in service in 1952; the first nuclear power station was British, Calder Hall, commissioned in 1956; and the world's first and only supersonic commercial jet aircraft was Anglo-French, Concorde, in service in 1976. Yet these technical advances crippled us economically, because they were so uncommercial. The nuclear generation of electricity, for example, had lost 2.1 billion pounds by 1975 (2.1 billion pounds was a lot then); Concord had lost us, alone, 2.3 billion pounds by 1976; the Comet crashed and America now dominates computers. Had these vast sums of money not been wasted on research, we would now be a significantly richer country.

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