Pat Cadigan Quotes

Second, we're spending a huge amount of money on technology so that everyone can check out laptops and portable phones. We're spending more money to write our existing information into databases or onto CD-ROM.

The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.

Regardless of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

Yet in this global economy, no jobs are safe. High-speed Internet connections and low-cost, skilled labor overseas are an explosive combination.

When the first computers started to come in, we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment.

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

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

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.

I think I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business and electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers.

Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.

We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.

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

What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.

The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.

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 not in an information age anymore. We're in the information management age.

Productivity is grounded in the PC. Where does the computing power come from? How would you run 'USA Today' without PCs? Run a hospital without PCs? People don't want products, they want solutions.

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies.

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 great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.