The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
HAVELOCK ELLIS, Little Essays on Love and Virtue
The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.
ITALO CALVINO and PATRICK CREAGH, Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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
Computers are Janus-faced, helping to create jobs even as they destroy jobs.
FRANK LEVY, The New Division of Labor
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
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
Like sex drives, card tricks, and the weather, computers tend to be discussed in terms of results rather than processes, which makes them rather scary.
MARTIN MAYER, attributed, Little Giant Encyclopedia: Toasts & Quotes
Like the mind, the computer is useful because it produces information. Computers are also functional because they are able to produce a wide variety of responses that mimic human abilities. As the brain has been compared with the computer, the idea that the mind is a mechanical entity has become more plausible. For example, just as the computer operates on electricity, the brain is now described as an object comprised of electronically sensitive cells or neuron networks. Although the nervous system, which is the controlling agent for the body, continues to be shrouded in mystery, many investigators have found it attractive to equate the mind with the brain and to identify both with the computer.
VICENTE BERDAYES, Computers, Human Interaction, and Organizations
Computers are in essence millions of tiny simple machines coordinated and connected together to accomplish a useful purpose. Comparing a computer with the human brain puts the computer at a disadvantage. The brain is so complex it's not even fully understood! By contrast all the technology involved in computers is obviously understood and harnessed by humans. Both computers and the human brain are very different in the way they handle instructions. For instance the brain handles millions of bits of information simultaneously. Most computers though, can handle just 64 bits of information at the same time; it just does it in millionths of a second. The computer then is able to handle the few instructions it receives much faster.
DEAN ORMANDY, Conquering Computers
As science fiction writers began to get their first glimmerings of the kind of power that computers might someday control, their immediate reaction was one of panic. Even through the 1960s, this view of computers as powerful gods did not change; it only became more sophisticated. For instance, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story that began with every telephone on earth ringing at the same time. Over the course of the next few hours, there were an extraordinary number of plane crashes and accidents. The punch line of the story was that the communications network that linked every machine on the planet into one vast consciousness had finally "awakened." The ringing of the phones was the birth cry of the baby and the crash of the planes was its first attempt to play. And so on. The idea was this: When the consciousness wakes up, watch out.
DAVID GERROLD, InfoWorld, Jul. 5, 1982
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
Compassion--that's the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it's the one thing that keeps man ahead of them.
D.C. FONTANA, Star Trek: The Ultimate Computer
Because computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true. Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me. My computer's memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.
ALAN COOPER, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Computers are really very stupid multimillion-dollar collections of wires and transistors. Plug one in and it does nothing. Yell at it, curse, kick it--and still it remains mute. The reason: no instructions. But once people write instructions, the computer becomes a marvelous tool.
STANLEY L. ENGLEBARDT, Popular Science, Jan. 1965
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
You have to remember that virtual reality won't be mature for everyday use for decades perhaps, and we don't know what the real situation will be like then. It will undoubtedly be different, so to talk about how it can help, we have to talk about the present and talk about computers. I'll tell you how I think about the economic role of computers, and this might be a little cynical, but I think it's actually pretty accurate. In the industrial revolution, which is still continuing in less developed parts of the world, machines were created that replaced human labor and created free time for people. But our economic system is based on earned capital, so that if you have this free time, you also don't earn any money to buy food. And this creates a crisis. The question is, if you're going to create all this leisure time with all these industrial machines, how do you justify paying people within a capitalist system so that they can survive? I think computers are the answer. I think computers are this sort of massive work program that keeps everybody busy manipulating information, and thus able to earn their bread.
JARON LANIER, Spin Magazine, Nov. 1995
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