Stephen Colbert Quotes
I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.
Colbert, Stephen. The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, 2013.
This is one of the great perceptions of what was to come in computing.
He was one of the fathers of modern computer science and the first serious programmer. Before there were computers generally available, he had programmed special IBM machines to crack the German’s “uncrackable” Enigma code.
See {68645} for his vision of how this would be done.
He was one of the team that created the first Atomic Bomb. In 1946, the atomic bomb was known about by almost all Americans and almost no one had even heard of a computer or the concept of a computer. The British and Americans during the war had collaborated to build very limited electronic calculating machines but the concept of programs to control the calculating machines was new—initially created by van Neumann and Englishman Alan Turing. When he made this statement most people thought it was the ravings of a “mad scientist. He was one of the team that later developed the first real computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.”
This basic notion was actually quite radical in the sense that the reality at the time she wrote this article was that people had almost no control over the data about themselves including the fact that individuals in relatively few situations had a right to even see the data that was collected about them. They certainly had no power of ownership which would include the right to have it seen or stored anywhere or not. The largest offender at the time was not the government but the private companies—especially the so called credit agencies. They maintained, and at the time the law supported them is that they owned the data they collected about an individual and could do with it what they wanted regardless of the individual’s wishes.
Hine was emphasizing the importance of the worker, However, since 1932, there has been technological change. Behind the building of modern machines are still the brains of men, but not so much the toil anymore. Most machines are made in modern times by a combination of the “toil” of men and robots, and the proportion done by men is steadily decreasing. And this change has been a large factor of the loss of dignity and respect that the American manual worker has undergone.
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. He is best known for hosting the satirical Comedy Central program The Colbert Report from 2005 to 2014 and the CBS talk program The Late Show with Stephen Colbert beginning in September 2015.
