quotations about computers
That computers are qualitative, representation-processors, making them primarily art tools, is wonderful. That we emasculate and objectify them before we've even begun is sad indeed.
STUART MEALING
Computers and Art
Computers are like motorbikes. They're easy to crash, impossible to fit all the family on and passengers you do take can only look over your shoulder.
DEAN ORMANDY
Conquering Computers
Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Business Quotations
Computers are composed of nothing more than logic gates stretched out to the horizon in a vast numerical irrigation system.
STAN AUGARTEN
State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit
The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.
ITALO CALVINO and PATRICK CREAGH
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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.
ANDY ROONEY
"A Few Words from Andy Rooney: A Face of America Commentary"
Computers are machines and thus not subject to the biases and prejudices that distort human information processing and decision making--computers are objective in some absolute sense. In addition, computers are driven by purely logical mechanisms that are open to inspection; thus, computer-generated results must be totally rational and logical--they must be the "truth." Unfortunately (or is it fortunately?), the most utter rubbish and prejudice-saturated nonsense is as easily generated from logical mechanisms as by any other means. The use of a logical basis in no way guarantees correct and true conclusions. In fact, quite the contrary is the case. Simple classical logic is singularly ineffective in the empirical world of incomplete and poor quality information.... Thus, computers are, in general, no more infallible than you, or I, or the persons who programmed them.
DEREK PARTRIDGE
Artificial Intelligence and Business Management
The similarities between humans and computers are more numerous than the differences.
P. A. SCOTT
Global Ergonomics
Programs are detailed because computers are machines. Machines do not have intelligence. A computer blindly follows your instructions, step by step. If you do not give detailed instructions, the computer can do nothing.
GREG M. PERRY
Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours
When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
ISAAC ASIMOV
attributed, The Definitive Guide to Managing the Numbers
The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.
LEO CHERNE
attributed, The World of Work: Careers and the Future
The computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It makes a good manager better faster and a bad manager worse faster.
EDWARD M. ESBER
attributed, In Search of Stupidity
Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts--those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence--then why bother existing? to produce human art a computer would have to find, feel, absorb reality to the point it is overcome, to the point it sobs for release. A computer perhaps could replicate every possibility but could never transfer the energy art requires to exist in the first place.
JASON LEE MILLER
"Automated Content Will Unmake Existence"
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.
DONALD KNUTH
preface, The Art of Computer Programming
Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them.
D.C. FONTANA
"The Ultimate Computer", Star Trek
I understand the link between the commands I type and the actions the computer performs can be reduced to a predictable input/output network, albeit a massively complex one. And thanks to this knowledge, I do not attribute magical qualities to the machine. I don't get angry at it. I don't try to read its mood, interpret the emotional subtext of its communications with me, or start to sulk if it takes too long to boot up. I don't take it personally--most of the time.
BERNARD BECKETT
Falling for Science
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
STEVE JOBS
Memory and Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress
Computers do what they are told. They slavishly obey any instructions given in their own programming language. This is how they do useful things like word processing and spreadsheet calculations. But, as in inevitable by-product, they are equally robotic in obeying bad instructions. They have no way of telling whether an instruction will have a good effect or a bad. They simply obey, as soldiers are supposed to do. It is there unquestioning obedience that makes computers useful, and exactly the same thing makes them inescapably vulnerable to infection by software viruses and worms. A maliciously designed program that says, "Copy me and send me to every address that you find on this hard disk" will simply be obeyed, and then obeyed again by other computers down the line to which it is sent, in exponential expansion. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to design a computer which is usefully obedient and at the same time immune to infection.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
KONRAD ZUSE
Hersfelder Zeitung