Technological Surprise Quotes

The revolution in AI [artifical intelligence] has been profound. It surprised me, even though I was sitting right there.

For me personally, the technology that has taken the most unexpected turn in my lifetime is what I refer to as 'the device formerly known as the cell phone.' I still remember many predictions that by 2000 there would only be about a million cell phone users. Boy, were they ever wrong!

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.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

If you had told me in 1997 that even 5 people would be waiting online for me to sign my new book in 2009, I would have jumped around like Joe Carter in the 1993 World Series. I love it. I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't like it. The only thing I worry about is carpal tunnel syndrome - my last tour almost caused it.

It is difficult to predict technology more than 10 years out with any certitude, but what I observe is that change and innovation happens earlier and faster than we expect. We are constantly surprised at what technology can do.

The revolution in deep nets has been very profound. It definitely surprised me, even though I was sitting right there.

I'm surprised that VR has come about so quickly. It's lucky I just happened to write a book imagining virtual reality right on the cusp of it actually happening.

Nobody ever imagined how quickly the Android mobile-phone platform would take off - not even Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley engineer who created it.

Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place.

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

That machines will surpass us in intelligence is inevitable. What it means is unknowable. Will they be sentient? What will they care about in the sense that determines our human motivations? All the theorizing by the experts and non-experts makes for interesting conversations and dramatic headlines, but it's more likely we will be surprised by how our technology develops and how it is used, as we so often are.

Computers get better, faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic.

I think I must be the only grandmother in the world who was given an iPod by her grandsons. It has changed my life - I'd be lost without it.

The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.

The world wide web has really been quite spectacular and not something I would have predicted.