It’s important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers.
The idea that computers can ever replace teachers and schools reveals a deep lack of understanding about the role leadership plays in student success.
In 2004, the iPod was a novelty, and tablet computers were a dream. Now we take for granted that we can see whatever we want whenever and wherever we want to see it, be it ‘Grand Illusion’ or ‘Duck Dynasty.’
In high school, I used to teach guitar and fix computers by the hour. I was looking for some way to make some cash, so I actually learned how to play guitar in order to try to teach it.
For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people’s computers.
When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology.
Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers.
The capacity of computers is doubling every eight months. It’s exponential development. I think it’s a real threat, actually, that a computer one day will be more intelligent than us.
I do a lot of work on computers, but I am so practiced in drawing that I can draw it full size, and you can take the measurements off my drawings. It’s like drafting, but it’s a work of art – a really beautiful drawing.
GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early ‘90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.
I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth’s landscape.
There are more clocks than ever – clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second – but they all seem to matter less.
We want the digital world to bend to your physical life, your real emotional life as a person, and we don’t want you to bend to computers.
At home, we’re listening to TV or playing with our computers, so our entertaining is rusting. We don’t know how to be good hosts and guests in business situations.
I have sometimes thought the power of computers had exceeded our ability to use them, but Mr. Jobs and his team kept giving us devices that made indispensable things easier in ways you never thought of.
I think that what computers have done is just disastrous to the language.
Right at the start, when I was about 13 or 14, I only had an Amiga 500 Plus running a bit of tracker software called OctaMED. My brother was big into his computers, and when he moved up to a proper PC, I took charge of the Amiga.
In 1983, before computers came along, it wasn’t easy to do electronic basslines and rhythms.
By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew I wanted to move to Silicon Valley and learn more about computers and the Internet. I just fell in love with technology and the potential of everything the Internet had to offer.
If somebody had told me when I was in graduate school, ‘Brian, in 35 years you’ll get a chance to fly the first commercial spacecraft with no computers,’ I’d have said, ‘I don’t think so. People are not going to be that stupid.’
We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I’d like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.
I always loved computers – it’s something inside you.
Charlestoning is hard. People were fit in the ‘20s to be able to do that. I guess they didn’t sit in front of their computers all day.
We resemble computers intellectually and animals emotionally.
