Machine Capability Quotes

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.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.

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.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.

By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.

It's hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they're always smarter than you think.

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.

I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?

The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.

I continue to see a healthy PC market, very healthy. The machines will continue to morph; you'll see smaller machines that have more capability.

The development of artificial intelligence may well imply that man will relinquish his intellectual supremacy in favor of thinking machines. With oceans of time available for future innovation, there seems to be no reason why machines cannot achieve and surpass anything of which the human brain is capable.

The Difference Engine can in reality (as has been already partly explained) do nothing but add; and any other processes, not excepting those of simple subtraction, multiplication and division, can be performed by it only just to that extent in which it is possible, by judicious mathematical arrangement and artifices, to reduce them to a series of additions.

In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics, then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn't do anything that people are doing, and we don't really see any evidence that this is not the case.

We're making progress, but getting machines to replicate our ability to perceive and manipulate the world remains incredibly hard.

Machines already are much smarter than us at so many things. I mean, try to multiply two 10-digit numbers with each other or, you know, sift through a thousand documents. So there's lots of things that machines are better at including in mental task than us. There's many more that they're not as good at, but the direction is pretty obvious and the progress is clear.

The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.