Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

Ask not what the brain can do for the computer. Ask what the computer can do for the brain.

It is becoming harder for us to stay on top of the onslaught - e-mails, messages, appointments, alerts. Augmented intelligence offers the possibility of winnowing an increasing number of inputs and options in a way that humans can't manage without a helping hand.

In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools.

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.

If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.

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

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

It's not telepathy. It's not the Borg. But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.

There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.

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.

If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.

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

People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.

The human brain must continue to frame the problems for the electronic machine to solve.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

The computer is a moron.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies.

The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.

The idea [of the Quantum Computer] is to create a machine that is as intelligence as humans, and probably much more so.

We need to invest in technologies that amplify human capacity, not replace it.