Ralph Merkle Quotes

Unlike us, machines do not have a 'nature' consistent across vast reaches of time. They are, at least to begin with, whatever we set in motion - with an inbuilt tendency towards the exponential.

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

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

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.

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.

A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.

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

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.

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

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

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.

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

I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that.

I took computers in high school. I would do all my own programming, but I didn't see the future of computers for anything other than data processing. Who was going to use a computer for communications?

It's not telepathy. It's not the Borg. But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.

My background really comes from geekdom and the idea of building a smart machine. If we're going to build a smart machine, let's have it read good books.

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.

I just write mechanical things.

There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.

If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.

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