Erik Brynjolfsson Quotes

Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.

Computers get better, faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic.

I saw the logarithmic growth of computer power.

Computers double their performance every month.

The way Moore's Law occurs in computing is really unprecedented in other walks of life. If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars. Those enormous changes just aren't part of our everyday experience.

It's Moore's Law, everything will be obsolete in 10 years - I'll be obsolete in 10 years!

Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of five trillion bits per second in storage and two trillion transistors per second on the processing side.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.

Every two years, to keep Moore's Law happening, you have to invent... That's where I grew up.

The speed at which modern CPUs perform computations still blows my mind daily.

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.

If it weren't for Moore's law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me.

The form of computers has never been important, with speed and performance being the only things that mattered.

When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.

Space has not changed but technology has, in many cases, improved dramatically. A good example is digital technology where today's cell phones are far more powerful than the computers on the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module that we used to navigate to the moon and operate all the spacecraft control systems.

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.

That we plug in carts or CDs with megabytes of memory when only yesterday we were happy to have 64K or 128K in our Apple II and PC workhorses... that's nothing short of phenomenal.

I have sometimes thought the power of computers had exceeded our ability to use them, but Mr. Jobs and his team kept giving us devices that made indispensable things easier in ways you never thought of.

Man has existed for about a million years. He has possessed writing for about 6,000 years, agriculture somewhat longer, but perhaps not much longer. Science, as a dominant factor in determining the belief of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful revolutionary force. When we consider how recently it has risen to power, we find ourselves forced to believe that we are at the very beginning of its work in transforming human life.

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.