David Autor Quotes

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.

The capacity of computers is doubling every eight months. It's exponential development. I think it's a real threat, actually, that a computer one day will be more intelligent than us.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.

Our lives sometimes depend on computers performing as predicted.

People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.

We're going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

The computer is a moron.

People don't understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.

Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more., Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.

This is a magical time for computer programming. We are moving towards the artifical intelligence holy grail of programming the computer to simulate the human brain.

Today, there are industries employing hundreds of thousands of engineers creating artificial intelligence.

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to learn without being explicitly programmed.

Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.

Once computers can program, they basically take over technological progress because already, today, the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming.

Everything that humans can do a machine can do.

People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.