You have to wait for people to program you. The only difference is the amount of people that you’re going to reach but that’s going to even out in the next two or three years anyway. Computers are being bought faster than televisions right now.
Scientists have discovered that, as we age, our brains act like computers with fuller and fuller hard drives. So when we’re trying to recall a fact or a word or a name, it takes us longer, because – to put it scientifically – our brains hold a lot of ‘stuff.’
Even though chess isn’t the toughest thing that computers will tackle for centuries, it stood as a handy symbol for human intelligence. No matter what human-like feat computers perform in the future, the Deep Blue match demands an indelible dot on all timelines of AI progress.
In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn’t work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They’re relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.
Open-source encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and search engines such as Google and Bing, which people can tap into anytime and anywhere via computers and smart phones, put a world of knowledge at our fingertips at a lower cost than ever before.
Educated women armed with computers have defeated extremists by denying them a monopoly to define cultural identity and interpret religious texts. No extremist can say that women are inferior to men without being made a laughingstock on Al Jazeera. Islam insisted on equality between everyone.
My advice is not always so logical and consistent. But then, love is not logical and consistent. So why should my advice be? If you want that kind of thinking, go to a computer. Computers are always logical and consistent, and you see how often they get proposed to.
For short term relaxation, I take a hot tub. It’s my best way to unblock writers’ block, too. For a bit longer relaxation, I enjoy camping. Just being in the wilderness, with no phones or computers or anything I have to do really refreshes my spirit.
Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it’s still being invented; we’re still trying to work out how it works. There’s a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn’t recognise. It’s time for the machines to disappear. The computer’s got to disappear into all of the things we use.
I’ve never been much of a computer guy at least in terms of playing with computers. Actually until I was about 11 I didn’t use a computer for preparing for games at all. I was playing a bit online, was using the chess club mainly. Now, obviously, the computer is an important tool for me preparing for my games.
Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school – this was in the 1960s.
The new generation of musicians is writing music on computers, and this is very sad because the quality of songwriting has crashed and dived. There are some songs out that are made by only one guy who works a computer and doesn’t play any instruments.
That’s what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the, ‘Oh, somebody coughed in the background; we need to take that out’ – or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.
I’ve always taken apart calculators and anything I can get my hands on when I was younger. When I was around 12 – like, 6th grade – my parents always had around Mac computers because my mom is a teacher. So I’d always be playing around with all the crazy applications and making banners and printing things out and always into graphic design.
The humanitarian developers behind World of Warcraft have also discovered a way to bribe gamers into turning off their computers and going outside. If you log off for a few days, your character will be more ‘rested’ when you resume playing, a mode that temporarily speeds up your leveling.
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it’s true, it’s very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say… it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.
I had originally wanted to be a lawyer. Even when I went to college and majored in engineering, I still thought I’d get a law degree. Then I started taking electrical engineering classes where I saw some of the innovation happening around computers and solid-state technology in the mid ‘80s.
I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend’s garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.
Regardless of how it’s done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you’re in the transaction business. They’re wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.
This is what customers pay us for – to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.
I have a cell phone that doesn’t behave like a phone: It behaves like a computer that makes calls. Computers are becoming an integral part of daily life. And if people don’t start designing them to be more user-friendly, then an even larger part of the population is going to be left out of even more stuff.
Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.
And it’s here and it’s ready and we can really revolutionize the way we educate our children with tablet computers, and I’m committed to doing whatever I can to speaking to whomever I can to send this signal – to pound this message home. Now is the time.
