Quotes by Computer Scientists - Page 2

Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.
Brian Christian
When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?
Jaron Lanier
... theory is good for you because studying it expands your mind... Specific technical knowledge, though useful today, becomes outdated in just a few years. Consider instead the abilities to think, to express yourself clearly and precisely, to solve problems, and to know when you haven’t solved a problem. These abilities have lasting value. Studying theory trains you in these areas.
Michael Sipser
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
Jon Postel
Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it's--boring
Seymour Papert
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
Alan J. Perlis
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Robert Wilensky
Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room to grow.
Ed Catmull
The reason [James Clerk] Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle is also known as "no free lunch."We do our best to implement Maxwell's Demon whenever we manipulate reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we certainly can't get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell's Demon if you don't look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always lose more than you gain.Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell's Demon, separating the state of "one" from the state of "zero" for a while, at a cost. A computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved.
Jaron Lanier
Insanity is the only real escape from the banality of our lives. - Clara Bayliss
John Hennessy
This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.
Jaron Lanier
There is a fine line between free speech and hate speech. Free speech encourages debate whereas hate speech incites violence.
Newton Lee
He or she who gets hired is not necessarily the one who can do that job best; but, the one who knows the most about how to get hired.
Richard Lathrop
It is better to beg forgiveness, than ask permission.
Grace Murray Hopper
The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.
Tim Berners-Lee
Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.
Jaron Lanier
For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.
Rudy Rucker
You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.
Vernor Vinge
Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty
Grace Murray Hopper
Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.
W. Daniel Hillis
There. We can be friends now.""Someone like you could never be my friend.""Why ever not?""Because I'm a nice person, and you're a sick, twisted bitch.
John Hennessy
Forrest Gander: "Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.
Brian Christian
What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.
Jaron Lanier
Overstimulation has been the real drawback. I need to find ways to stop thinking about analysis of algorithms, in order to do various other things that human beings ought to do.
Donald Ervin Knuth
The two-way street of Total Information Awareness is the road that leads to a more transparent and complete picture of ourselves, our governments, and our world.
Newton Lee
Stories are a kind of theme park of mortality. Deadnyland.
James W. Blinn
Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.
Rudy Rucker
I hate funerals and would not attend my Own if it could be avoided but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.
Robert T. Morris
Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.
Vernor Vinge
A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
Jaron Lanier
Database Management System [Origin: Data + Latin basus "low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, ounterfeit."] A complex set of interrelational data structures allowing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete record of the logical relations between the missing items. -- From The Devil's DP Dictionary
Stan Kelly Bootle
He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
Vernor Vinge
My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we're doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.
Larry Page
It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.
Vernor Vinge
Instead of concentrating just on finding good answers to questions, it's more important to learn how to find good questions!
Donald E. Knuth
Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.
Jaron Lanier
Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.
Vernor Vinge
To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.
Brian Christian
An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.
Jaron Lanier
Normal is the greatest enemy with regard to creating the new. And the way of getting around this is you have to understand normal not as reality, but just a construct. And a way to do that, for example, is just travel to a lot of different countries and you'll find a thousand different ways of thinking the world is real, all of which are just stories inside of people's heads. That's what we are too. Normal is just a construct, and to the extent that you can see normal as a construct in yourself, you have freed yourself from the constraints of thinking this is the way the world is. Because it isn't. This is the way we are.
Alan Kay
Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.
Vernor Vinge
Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider—to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.(Jane Smiley (2010). The Man Who Invented the Computer)
Konrad Zuse
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
Donald Ervin Knuth
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer art is everything else.
Donald Ervin Knuth
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
Marvin Minsky
Trust doesn't mean that you trust that someone won't screw up— it means you trust them even when they do screw up.
Ed Catmull
You manage things, you lead people.
Admiral Grace Hopper
Our judgments betray our expectations, and our expectations betray our experience. What we project about the future reveals a lot—about the world we live in, and about our own past.
Brian Christian
New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.
Robert Kahn
Always deliver more than expected.
Larry Page
Go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize after something's been done than to get permission ahead of time.
Grace Murray Hopper
The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.
Jaron Lanier
A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential for great programming teams, too.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
In memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, 'To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have bee.
Brian Christian
enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.
Jaron Lanier
Then, too, I am constantly confronted by students, some of whom have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to know the world, and who seek only a deeper, more dogmatic indoctrination in that faith (although the world is no longer in their vocabulary). Other students suspect that not even the entire collection of machines and instruments at MIT can significantly give meaning to their lives. They sense the presence of a dilemma in an education polarized around science and technology, an education that implicitly claims to open a privileges access-path to fact, but that cannot tell them how to decide what to count as fact. Even while they recognize the genuine importance of learning their craft, they rebel at working on projects that appear to address themselves neither to answering interesting questions of fact nor to solving problems in theory.
Joseph Weizenbaum
Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.
Richard P. Gabriel
You're a vampire?""Yes.""So what does that make me, your victim?""You're clearly not as dumb as you look.
John Hennessy
While games are fun to play, children should grow up not just being the consumers of technology but also the creators of technology.
Newton Lee
Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.
Jaron Lanier