Data Processing Quotes

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 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.

Facebook and Twitter have a ton of information they're trying to make sense of.

A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.

IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.

To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

It contains almost 190,000 accounts. At the rate of one per minute, eight hours a day, it would take over a year to reflect upon these.

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.

To be honest, more than what I prepare, it's the directors who do the bulk of the work, researching, collecting data and all that. I like to see myself as a processor: they feed me with the data, I give the output.

We’re not used to calculating large amounts of data. Our brains think anecdotally.

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

When the first computers started to come in, we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment.

The Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it had no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

In A.I., the holy grail was how do you generate internal representations.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

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.

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

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

Big data is indeed a buzzword but it is one that is frankly under-hyped.

Data really powers everything that we do.

I used to collect computer punch cards from the data centers.

Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?