One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible.
Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised.
Failure’s inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.
Computers shouldn’t be parents, but they are. Please, spend time with your kids. If you don’t want to, then I don’t want to. It might hurt you to discipline your offspring, but it saves the child from being disciplined later by someone less forgiving. Like a criminal court judge. If you don’t spank your child, someone else will.
Computers absolutely changed my life. Before I had a computer, I had never written one thing. Not one thing. I’m a very bad speller and I was embarrassed by that. When I would type, the little mistakes would make me nutty, and I would never edit anything.
By the time we get to the 2040s, we’ll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that’s singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.
Than Shwe ordered the confiscation of all cell phones and laptops and computers so no reportage could come out of Burma. It seemed clear that a demon, something diabolical, rather than something compassionate and human was in charge of Burma.
My poor children have been the subject of all of my experiments. We’re still doing what I call ‘Amish summers’ where I turn off all electronics and pack away all their computers and stuff and watch them scream for a while until they settle down into, like, an electronic-free summer.
I have a crazy amount of different jobs, so the way I manage that is to not do more than one at a time. It’s like old computers that had small memory chips, they would do something called swapping, where they would fill the memory with one task, do it and get it out.
Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don’t have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the DMV and look around, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.’
I think that is one of the main goals of pushing forward in machine learning: having computers provide the wisdom that a human companion would be able to provide in offering advice, looking up more information when necessary and those kinds of things.
Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn’t mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that’s as smart as we are?
Everything is being run by computers. Everything is reliant on these computers working. We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working. And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us. We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail.
As the world transitions to the Internet of Everything – where people, processes, and data are intelligently connected – we’ll be linked in even more ways. Here, billions and trillions of sensors around the earth and in its atmosphere will send information back to machines, computers, and people for further evaluation and decision-making.
There’s no telling how many guns we have in America – and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated.
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being – well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
If I was designing a web site for elementary school children, I might have a much higher percentage of older computers with outdated browsers since keeping up with browser and hardware technology has not traditionally been a strong point of most elementary schools.
Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.
The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired.
What’s happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
One of the things that is not so good is that a decision was made long ago about the size of an IP address – 32 bits. At the time it was a number much larger than anyone could imagine ever having that many computers but it turned out to be to small.
Every ISP is being attacked, maliciously both from in the United States and outside of the United States, by those who want to invade people’s privacy. But more importantly they want to take control of computers, they want to hack them, they want to steal information.
Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, ‘toxic’ financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.
