#computers

So the thing I realized rather gradually - I must say starting about 20 years ago now that we know about computers and things - there's a possibility of a more general basis for rules to describe nature. ↗

— Stephen Wolfram

#ago #basis #computers #describe #general

It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership--leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed. Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status--Steve Jobs--recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets. ↗

— Damon Horowitz

#computers #engineers #human-beings #humanism #leaders

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#freud #freudians #internet #marx #marxism

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now. ↗

— Jhumoa Lahiri

#accounts #actually #computers #email #few

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#eventually #get #journalists #kill #middle-class

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do. ↗

— Ted Nelson

#about #bad #bad news #good #good news

We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. ↗

— Tim O'Reilly

#data #entering #important #may #more

Interactive computers and software will, I think, provide a less costly method of doing some kinds of inquiry, in knowledge acquisition and even reasoning and interaction. ↗

— Roy Romer

#computers #costly #doing #even #i

Our lives sometimes depend on computers performing as predicted. ↗

— Philip Emeagwali

#depend #lives #our #our lives #performing

I wouldn't know how to find eBay on the computer if my life depended on it. ↗

— Marc Jacobs

#computer #depended #ebay #find #how