Computers

“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"...I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

“It makes sense to examine Plato and pottery together in order to understand the Greek world, Descartes and the mechanical clock together in order to understand Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same way, it makes sense to regard the computer as a technological paradigm for the science, the philosophy, even the art of the coming generation.”

“The clock has been the center of Western technology since its invention in the Middle Ages. Computer technology too finds it indispensable, although it has changed the clock from a mechanical device to a wholly electronic one.”

“I have bought this wonderful machine- a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine- it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.”

“Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend.”

“This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right.”

“If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.”

“"So computers are tools of the devil?" thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.”

“Where a calculator like the ENIAC today 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 only 1½ tons.”

“What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger.”

“Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.”

“These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.”

“The Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

“Dare to be gorgeous and unique. But don't ever be cryptic or otherwise unfathomable. Make it unforgettably great.”

“The reality is that future cyber warfare will likely resemble medieval siege warfare – as critical infrastructure and vital services to a city's population are shut-down and locked-out as a result of a ransomware attack.”

“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.”

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

“An adversary capable of implanting the right virus or accessing the right terminal can cause massive damage.”

“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”

“Computers with their binary on–off logic seem to appeal to the military mind. This is because the military, in order to counter the inherent confusion and danger of war,is forever seeking ways to make communications as terse and unambiguous as humanly possible. Computers by their very nature do just that. Had they only been able to stand at attention and salute, in many ways they would have made ideal soldiers.”

“It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now.”

“The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.”

“Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

“Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”

“Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?”

“A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year.”

“The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.”

“The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user.”