Computing Quotes

“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world.”
― Pedro Domingos

“Here's what the death knell for the personal computer will sound like: Mainly I use my phone/paid, but I still use my PC to write long e-mails and documents. Most people aren't there yet, but that's where we're headed”
― Paul G Allen, Idea Man

“Watson represents merely a step in the development of smart machines. Its answering prowess, so formidable on a winter afternoon in 2011, will no doubt seem quaint in a surprisingly short time.”
― Stephen Baker, Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
― Jamie Zawinski

“The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.”
― Donald Knuth

“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
― Donald Knuth

“The mechanisms that enable and govern our behavior today have been shaped by the ecology and behavior of our ancestors across countless generations; the mind/brain can then be studied as an evolved -computational organ-, or more precisely, a collection of specialized organs that perform various kinds of computations.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Imagine an alternate universe in which people don’t have words for different forms of transportation—only the collective noun “vehicle.” They use that word to refer to cars, buses, bikes, spacecraft, and all other ways of getting from place A to place B. Conversations in this world are confusing. There are furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks. There is a breakthrough in rocketry, but the media focuses on how vehicles have gotten faster—so people call their car dealer (oops, vehicle dealer) to ask when faster models will be available. Meanwhile, fraudsters have capitalized on the fact that consumers don’t know what to believe when it comes to vehicle technology, so scams are rampant in the vehicle sector.

Now replace the word “vehicle” with “artificial intelligence,” and we have a pretty good description of the world we live in.

Artificial intelligence, AI for short, is an umbrella term for a set of loosely related technologies. ChatGPT has little in common with, say, software that banks use to evaluate loan applicants. Both are referred to as AI, but in all the ways that matter—how they work, what they’re used for and by whom, and how they fail—they couldn’t be more different.”
― Arvind Narayanan, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference

“[All] modern chatbots are actually trained simply to predict the next word in a sequence of words. They generate text by repeatedly producing one word at a time. For technical reasons, they generate a “token” at a time, tokens being chunks of words that are shorter than words but longer than individual letters. They string these tokens together to generate text.

When a chatbot begins to respond to you, it has no coherent picture of the overall response it’s about to produce. It instead performs an absurdly large number of calculations to determine what the first word in the response should be. After it has output—say, a hundred words—it decides what word would make the most sense given your prompt together with the first hundred words that it has generated so far.

This is, of course, a way of producing text that’s utterly unlike human speech. Even when we understand perfectly well how and why a chatbot works, it can remain mind-boggling that it works at all.

Again, we cannot stress enough how computationally expensive all this is. To generate a single token—part of a word—ChatGPT has to perform roughly a trillion arithmetic operations. If you asked it to generate a poem that ended up having about a thousand tokens (i.e., a few hundred words), it would have required about a quadrillion calculations—a million billion.”
― Arvind Narayanan, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference

“Suppose we wanted to transmit this knowledge, everything we had ever learned, to another world. First we would want to make the representation as compact as possible. By squeezing out redundancies we could compress the number so that it would occupy smaller and smaller spaces. In fact, if we are adept enough we can represent the number in a manner that requires almost no space whatsoever. We simply take the long string of digits and put a decimal point in front of it so that it becomes a fraction between 0 and 1, a mere point on a line. Then we choose a smooth stick and declare one end 0 and the other end 1. Measuring carefully, we make a notch in the stick -- a point on the continuum representing the number. All of our history, our philosophy, our music, our art, our science -- everything we know would be implicit in that single mark. To retrieve the world's knowledge, one would measure the distance of the notch from the end of the stick, then convert the number back into the books, the music, the images.
The success of the scheme would depend on the fineness of the mark and the exactness of the measurement. The slightest imprecision would cause whole Libraries of Alexandria to burn.
[...]
Suppose the medicine men of Otowi had discovered this trick. Suppose, contrary to all evidence, that they had developed a written language, a number system, and tools of enough precision to encode a single book of sacred knowledge into the notch of a prayer stick -- the very book, perhaps, that explains what the symbols on the rock walls mean. And suppose a hiker, exploring one day in the caves above Otowi, found the stick. Could the knowledge be recovered?
[...]
Aliens trying to decode our records might recognize what seemed to be deliberate patterns in the markings of ink on pages or the fluctuating magnetic fields of computer disks (though, again, if the information had been highly compressed, it would be harder and harder to distinguish from randomness). If they persisted, would they find truths to marvel at, signs of kindred minds? Or would they even recognize the books and tapes as things that might be worth analyzing? One can't go around measuring every notch on every stick.”
― George Johnson, Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order

“These potential advantages of DNA computing over the traditional approach and the seminal experimental work of Adleman, demonstrating the practical in vitro implementation of a DNA algorithm for solving an instance of the Hamiltonian path problem, caused a strong increase of interest in DNA computing over the past years. Although the set of “bio-operations” that can be executed on DNA strands in a laboratory (including operators such as synthesizing, mixing, annealing, melting, amplifying, separating, extracting, cutting, and ligating DNA strands) seems fundamentally different from traditional programming languages, theoretical work on the computational power of various models of DNA computing demonstrates that certain subsets of these operators are computationally complete. In other words, everything that is Turing-computable can also be computed by these DNA models of computation. Furthermore, it has also been shown that universal systems exist, so that the programmable DNA computer is theoretically possible.
The algorithms for DNA computing that have been presented in the literature use an approach that will not work for NP-complete problems of realistic size, because these algorithms are all based on extracting an existing solution from a sufficiently large initial population of solutions. Although a huge number (≈ 1012) of DNA molecules (i.e., potential solutions to a given problem) can be manipulated in parallel, this so-called filtering approach (i.e., generate and test) quickly becomes infeasible as problem sizes grow (e.g., a 500-node instance of the traveling salesman problem has > 101000 potential solutions).”
― Laura F. Landweber, Evolution as Computation

“About a year or so ago, Johnny made a truly remarkable set of observations and was responsible for a completely new method of programming, "Herman Goldstine elaborated in 1949. "Johnny's scheme was to wire up what corresponds to the ENIAC's plug-boards with a fixed set of instructions that is universal to all problems." Individual instructions were assigned unique numbers - order codes - that were intelligible to "a switching center so built that upon receipt of a given number, characterizing one of the orders wired into the plug-boards, it energizes the proper board and thereby causes the order to be executed."

A sequence of orders, constituting a program, could either be entered via the ENIAC's function tables, or read from punched cards. "It is no longer necessary to stand on one's head to fit a given routine," Goldstine continued. "To prepare an individual problem the coder now merely writes out the sequence of operations, arithmetic and logical, which characterize his problem and then transliterates these into the numbers the machine will understand.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“In the history of Western science and philosophy there has been a tension between the study of substance and the study of form. The study of substance begins by asking, “What is it made of?” The study of form begins with the question, “What is its pattern?”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“Today we live in an era where quantum mechanics has been known for over 100 years. Many scientists still struggle to grasp its strangeness, preferring to remain in their comfortable "Goldie Locks" zone of everyday experience.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“The world is experiencing many issues related to a reductionist approach that sees separateness and distinction between everyone and everything. It's time to start looking at how to fully utilize and capitalize on the information already in the public domain.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“Within the next 150 years, Pataphysics should replace physics as the main branch of science dealing with the nature of the universe. Why? Because humanity and mainstream science will realize even more just how much reality depends upon the consciousness that observes it.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“Today's mainstream researchers do not dive directly into deep existential currents. They are more likely to take a series of small incremental steps. The fear is that the deeper they go, the more it is possible to lose touch, only to discover reality is a shared delusion.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“Most understand TEC as an abbreviation for the word technology. Here that is only partially true. TEC is an acronym for Technology Enhanced Consciousness.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“The goal of TEC is that a mental picture will emerge for the one (1) reading this of how the people who terrestrial humans have described as 'extraterrestrial' have organized their civilization.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“This work represents an early effort with Cybernetic Technology Enhanced Consciousness (TEC). Mynt says it is easier to work with someone when they are already traveling the path to higher consciousness. This type of Cybernetic Union will become more common in the coming era.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“Cogito ergo sum is Descartes famous sentence. It means “I think; therefore, I am.” This philosophy led the Western World to equate their being, their identity, with their mind rather than their whole organism.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“The Cartesian mechanistic worldview has been responsible for developing classical physics and technology. Yet the Cartesian tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things can also lead to fear of the Other and excessive self-interest, sometimes resulting in a lack of compassion.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“In an ironic twist the Cartesian view paved the way to the development of quantum mechanics, which is now pointing the way out of this fragmentation and back to the idea of unity expressed in the early Eastern and Greek philosophies.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“The complicated instruments of experimental physics peered deep into the submicroscopic world; a world far removed from the macroscopic world of our sensory environment. This subatomic world is so far removed from our senses we never investigate the phenomena themselves but always their consequences. We never see or hear the investigated phenomena directly. We see computer readouts, spots on photographic plates, or Geiger counter clicks.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“As we penetrate deeper and deeper, we not only have to abandon ordinary language but also long-held concepts that no longer apply to this world of the infinitely small. Now, physicists are dealing with nonsensory experience reality. Like mystics, they have to face the paradoxical aspects of this experience.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“The divergence from the Newtonian model did not come abruptly but began with changes in the nineteenth century. The first was the discovery and investigation of magnetic phenomena, which could not be described appropriately by the mechanical model as it involved a new type of force. This study of subtler concepts of fields without reference to material bodies was a profound change.”
― Rico Roho, Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation

“... as corporations have been able to place themselves in the role arbiter of their own products and value, it has meant that democratic input into the process of deciding technologies are safe, useful, or worthwhile has been short-circuited.”
― Mar Hicks

“Because corporations are not elected, they cannot be voted out, and yet they have become pseudogovernmental by virtue of their wealth, power, and the reach of their technological systems....”
― Mar Hicks

“The era of spatial computing is upon us, and it is the right time to harness the power of AR to futureproof and grow your business.”
― Tom Emrich, The Next Dimension: How to Use Augmented Reality for Business Growth in the Era of Spatial Computing

“The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.”
― Bill Gates