quotations about computers
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The Hero's Journey
The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. With an estimated average of one thousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100 trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation ... (but) only 200 calculations per second.... With 100 trillion connections, each computing at 200 calculations per second, we get 20 million billion calculations per second. This is a conservatively high estimate.... In 1997, $2,000 of neural computer chips using only modest parallel processing could perform around 2 billion calculations per second.... This capacity will double every twelve months. Thus by the year 2020, it will have doubled about twenty-three times, resulting in a speed of about 20 million billion neural connection calculations per second, which is equal to the human brain.
RAY KURZWEIL
The Age of Spiritual Machines
Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Beginning and the End
One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
FRANK HERBERT
Without Me Nothing
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
ALAN TURING
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
CLIVE JAMES
The Crystal Bucket
R2-D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer.
C-3PO
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
PABLO PICASSO
Orange Coast Magazine, May 1986
One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, "My little computer said such a funny thing this morning."
ALAN TURING
Time Magazine, Mar. 29, 1999
On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside -- this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.
WILLIAM GIBSON
interview, Storming the Reality Studio
Now they can do all these magic things with computers. So you think you get to do something in a movie and you find out you don't get to really do it.
ANGELINA JOLIE
interview, May 23, 2003
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history--with the possible exceptions of hand guns and tequila.
MITCH RATLIFFE
Reader's Digest, volume 157
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.
ALAN COOPER
introduction, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Computers will overtake humans with AI at some point within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.
STEPHEN HAWKING
remarks at Zeitgeist conference in London, 2015
Today's computers are not even close to a 4-year-old human in their ability to see, talk, move, or use common sense. One reason, of course, is sheer computing power. It has been estimated that the information processing capacity of even the most powerful supercomputer is equal to the nervous system of a snail--a tiny fraction of the power available to the supercomputer inside our skull.
STEVEN PINKER
How Unique You Are!
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.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Computers no longer interface with humans--they interact, and the interaction will become steadily deeper, more subtle, and more crucial to our collective sanity and ultimate survival.
ALAN COOPER
introduction, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
Computers are Janus-faced, helping to create jobs even as they destroy jobs.
FRANK LEVY
The New Division of Labor