The Best Way To Predict

Some People Worry That Artificial Intelligence Will Make Us Feel Inferior, But Then, Anybody In His Right Mind Should Have An Inferiority Complex Every Time He Looks At A Flower.

An Important Technology First Creates A Problem And Then Solves It.

The Flip Side Of The Coin Was That Even Good Programmers And Language Designers Tended To Do Terrible Extensions When They Were In The Heat Of Programming, Because Design Is Something That Is Best Done Slowly And Carefully.

Computer Literacy Is A Contact With The Activity Of Computing Deep Enough To Make The Computational Equivalent Of Reading And Writing Fluent And Enjoyable. As In All The Arts, A Romance With The Material Must Be Well Under Way. If We Value The Lifelong Learning Of Arts And Letters As A Springboard For Personal And Societal Growth, Should Any Less Effort Be Spent To Make Computing A Part Of Our Lives?

When I First Prepared This Particular Talk... I Realized That My Usual Approach Is Usually Critical. That Is, A Lot Of The Things That I Do, That Most People Do, Are Because They Hate Something Somebody Else Has Done, Or They Hate That Something Hasn't Been Done. And I Realized That Informed Criticism Has Completely Been Done In By The Web. Because The Web Has Produced So Much Uninformed Criticism. It's Kind Of A Gresham's Law-bad Money Drives The Good Money Out Of Circulation. Bad Criticism Drives Good Criticism Out Of Circulation. You Just Can't Criticize Anything.