Richard Dawkins Quotes

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

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

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

A computer is a machine for constructing mappings from input to output.

My first job on 2001 was to make all of the HAL readouts: the 16 screens that surround HAL's eyes.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

I became convinced that the whole essence of the computer revolution is interactivity. That was very early in my career. At the time I did that it was heresy.

Alan Turing gave us a mathematical model of digital computing that has completely withstood the test of time. He gave us a very, very clear description that was truly prophetic.

Technology is such a broad kind of term, it really applies to so many things, from the electric light to running cars on oil. All of these different things can be called technology. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with it, as I expect most people do. With the computer, I spend so many hours sitting in front of a computer.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

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

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

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.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

The idea [of the Quantum Computer] is to create a machine that is as intelligence as humans, and probably much more so.

The Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it had no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

Every technology that can improve the human condition could harm the human condition. Someone evil could program a robot to hurt people.

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

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.

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.

Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection.

Everything that humans can do a machine can do.

[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.