Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

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

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.

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.

I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world.

By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?

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

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

The computer is a moron.

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans.

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

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.

The computer of today is really in its infancy.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those areas where we should be proactive in controlling it rather than reactive. If we are reactive, by the time we will do the necessary things, it will be too late. Robots can do everything better than we [humans] can.

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.

Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks.

Computers are the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created. Yet, we treat them largely as a black box; as if it were an alien artifact that magically appeared on desks, in homes, and in our pockets.

Everything that humans can do a machine can do.

In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, 'That was the Internet Age.' And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.

Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind.

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.

Factories not what they used to be - they're all extremely high-tech.