Computer Science Quotes

“The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“...artificial intelligence will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century.”
― Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

“In the end, it all comes down to 0 and 1”
― Vineet Goel

“A system of logical instructions that an automaton can carry out and which causes the automaton to perform some organized task is called a code.”
― John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain

“The spectacle's instruction and the spectators' ignorance are wrongly seen as antagonistic factors when in fact they give birth to each other. In the same way, the computer's binary language is an irresistible inducement to the continual and unreserved acceptance of what has been programmed according to the wishes of someone else and passes for the timeless source of a superior, impartial and total logic. Such progress, such speed, such breadth of vocabulary! Political? Social? Make your choice. You cannot have both. My own choice is inescapable. They are jeering at us, and we know whom these programs are for. Thus it is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are still unable to read, for reading demands making judgements at every line; and is the only access to the wealth of pre-spectacular human experience. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.”
― Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

“Artificial intelligence is nowhere near attaining actual sentience or awareness. And without awareness it’s simply a mechanical device, which may pretend to show emotions and sentience, if it is programmed to do so, and thus it may be able to fool the humans as being alive, but in its own internal circuitry, it’d simply be following its preprogrammed tasks through the flowchart of an algorithm.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“And they came to be included in a culture and community that placed the computer science engineer at the highest level of social status.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“I wish to add my mite towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the most effective use of mankind; and certainly, I should feel it no small glory if I were enabled to be one of his most noted prophets (using this word in my own peculiar sense) in this world.”
― Ada Lovelace, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer

“Most improved things can be improved.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I got more interested in the calculator than I did in the problem.”
― Fernando Corbató

“The great paradox of automation is that the desire to eliminate human labor always generates new tasks for humans.”
― Mary L. Gray, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass – An Urgent Investigation into the Invisible Human Labor Powering AI and the Digital Economy

“Artificial intelligence will not destroy this planet, irresponsible human intelligence will.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“No technology that's connected to the internet is unhackable.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gospel of Technology

“If the brain had a native language we would be able to communicate with all humans without translation. Or even all other creatures on earth.”
― Ghassan Labban

“Simply In Depth......”
― Ajit Singh

“The component structure cannot be designed from the top down. It is not one of the first things about the system that is designed, but rather evolves as the system grows and changes.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“Automation vs. human labor is a false dichotomy”
― Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass – An Urgent Investigation into the Invisible Human Labor Powering AI and the Digital Economy

“The very last stage of any memory hierarchy is necessarily the outside world—that is, the outside world as far as the machine is concerned, i.e. that part of it with which the machine can directly communicate, in other words, the input and the output organs of the machine. These are usually punched paper tapes or cards, and on the output side, of course, also printed paper.”
― John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain

“All existing machines and memories use "direct addressing," which is to say that every word in the memory has a numerical address of its own that characterizes it and its position within the memory (the total aggregate of all hierarchic levels) uniquely.”
― John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain

“A code, which according to Turing's schema is supposed to make one machine behave as if it were another specific machine (which is supposed to make the former imitate the latter) must do the following things. It must contain, in terms that the machine will understand (and purposively obey), instructions (further detailed parts of the code) that will cause the machine to examine every order it gets and determine whether this order has the structure appropriate to an order of the second machine. It must then contain, in terms of the order system of the first machine, sufficient orders to make the machine cause the actions to be taken that the second machine would have taken under the influence of the order in question.”
― John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain

“Any artificial automaton that has been constructed for human use, and specifically for the control of complicated processes, normally possesses a purely logical part and an arithmetical part, i.e. a part in which arithmetical processes play no role, and one in which they are of importance.”
― John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain

“Spreadsheets are more important to marketing than pretty pictures these days.”
― Trevor Carss

“Il fattore umano è l'anello più debole della sicurezza”
― Kevin D. Mitnick, The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security

“AI research can have irreversible repercussions in the life of the human species, so we must tread cautiously.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mission Reality

“Computation is not the same as thought and emulation is not the same as imagination.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mission Reality

“AI can be programed to imitate human behavior only, but it can't be programmed to feel the emotions that make the humans behave the way they do.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mission Reality

“[The study of prime numbers] becoming pivotal in cryptography and online security. As it happens, it is much easier to multiply primes together than to factor them back out. In modern encryption, secret primes known only to the sender and recipient get multiplied together to create huge composite numbers that can be transmitted publicly without fear, since factoring the product would take eavesdropper way too long to be worth attempting.”
― Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

“The pipeline assumes a passive flow of women (and men) from one stage to the next culminating in a scientific career.”
― Enobong Hannah Branch, Pathways, Potholes, and the Persistence of Women in Science: Reconsidering the Pipeline

“If a machine ever gains awareness, it will be not due to our careful programming, but due to an unforeseeable anomaly.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gospel of Technology

“Software is like entropy: It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.”
― Norman Augustine