Jason Fried Quotes

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Computers add convenience to our everyday lives, but we are limited in what we can do with technology others have imagined. The ability for humans to teach machines entirely new things - coding - is nothing short of a superpower.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all.

Unlike us, machines do not have a 'nature' consistent across vast reaches of time. They are, at least to begin with, whatever we set in motion - with an inbuilt tendency towards the exponential.

I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that.

I just write mechanical things.

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

The computer is a moron.

People don't understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.

Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.

Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.

Computers are the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created. Yet, we treat them largely as a black box; as if it were an alien artifact that magically appeared on desks, in homes, and in our pockets.

Unlike a goldfish, a computer can't really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do.

People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

It's going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.

Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.