Charles Babbage Quotes

The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere 'calculating machines.' It holds a position wholly its own, and the considerations it suggests are more interesting in their nature.

The strength of the computer lies in its being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron; for logic is essentially stupid.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.

Maths is fundamentally a different process in education than it is in the real world. There is an insistence that we do maths by hand when most of it is done by computers. The idea that you have to do everything by hand before you can operate a computer is nonsense.

It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too.

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

The degree of intelligence that a man or a machine can show depends on many qualities of the ways that knowledge, goals, and problem-solving techniques are represented and put together, and not so much on the fine details.

It struck me deep in my mind. Some day, the chip is going to surpass mankind's brain.

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

To me, Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think.

Even if you're going into a field that has nothing to do with computer science, just having that way of analytical thinking and being able to process information and break it down is important no matter what you're doing. Having that knowledge of code is something that you can apply to your daily life.

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals and have its own will and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game.

A computer can have so much more in its brain that a human can.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.