Technology Quotes

"In the end we are interested in something much more subtle: whether a machine can make us believe it thinks."

"We might say that a machine has behaved in an intelligent manner if it could sucessfully imitate a human."

"The reader must accept it as a fact that digital computers can be constructed, and indeed have been constructed."

"To all intents and purposes, if a machine can behave like a human, is it not a human in some meaningful sense?"

"A digital computer can be made to do anything which we have sufficient ingenuity to describe in the form of directions."

"Computing machinery has only to run by itself, to achieve any result whatsoever."

"The universal computing machine can simulate any other machine that is constructible in theory."

"A machine that could pass for human in conversation would indeed be a remarkable achievement."

"Genetic engineering is child's play compared to the engineering nature has done."

"The machine has a soul if you go into it that way."

"Technology is merely a tool in human hands."

"Mankind has always been eager to accept any technological advance as an improvement, without first asking what might be lost."

"The patent system has done more for the advancement of civilization than any other institution."

"The telephone made us neighbors of the world."

"The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention."

"Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to read all of the internalpassages in the Library of Congress one by one."

"In the future, we will be able to build machines that can think for themselves."

"The computer doesn't really care what language you speak to it."

"Computers are just machines; they will only do what we tell them to do."

"Technology must serve truth, or it becomes a tool of deception."

"Technology that ignores nature's wisdom is destined to fail."

"I believe it is self-evident that it will soon cost much less to build a plane than to live in cities and towns where autos are in use."

"Technology is merely a tool; the human mind remains the greatest instrument."

"The question of whether a machine can think is about as meaningful as asking whether a submarine can swim."

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

"It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers."

"In fact the snag about artificial intelligence is much the same as the snag about natural intelligence. No one really understands it yet."

"We may say most of the things that can be said for the photograph album and magic lantern must be said for the machine thinking method."

"Let us suppose we have a machine which can be programmed in such a way that it will do the work of any given human computer."

"Machinery will eventually outdo human intelligence, though one would have to set the threshold rather high to make this claim appear profound."