John McKinley Quotes
Technology has been, and always will be, my one true passion professionally.
Time Warner. "AOL CTO John McKinley to Step Down." Time Warner Press Release, Time Warner, 2005.
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.”
A startlingly bad prediction by a Nobel-prize winning economist particularly given it was stated in 1998 rather than a much earlier date when the potential of the Internet wasn’t already apparent. Ironically, the quote is from a Red Herring article he wrote titled “Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong” in which he asserts that most economists predictions are wrong because they overestimate the impact of future technologies. See related quotes for additional equally erroneous Krugman predictions.
John McKinley was a U.S. Senator from the state of Alabama and an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.
