The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.
When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.
The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.
A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.
A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.