Digital Revolution Quotes
A startlingly bad prediction by a Nobel-prize winning economist particularly given it was stated in 1998 rather than a much earlier date when the potential of the Internet wasn’t already apparent. Ironically, the quote is from a Red Herring article he wrote titled “Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong” in which he asserts that most economists predictions are wrong because they overestimate the impact of future technologies. This quote is part of a longer, equally incorrect quote: “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” See related quotes.
Misquoted. In a March 9, 1999 interview on CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked the candidate Gore to describe what distinguished him from his Democratic challenger, New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. In part, he said: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” It was clumsy wording which was subsequently construed as Gore claiming to have invented the Internet, initially popularized by Declan McCullagh, a libertarian writer, in a post to Wired.
He was one of the team that created the first Atomic Bomb. In 1946, the atomic bomb was known about by almost all Americans and almost no one had even heard of a computer or the concept of a computer. The British and Americans during the war had collaborated to build very limited electronic calculating machines but the concept of programs to control the calculating machines was new—initially created by van Neumann and Englishman Alan Turing. When he made this statement most people thought it was the ravings of a “mad scientist. He was one of the team that later developed the first real computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.”
