Knowledge can be considered as a collection of information, or as an activity, or as a potential. If we think of it as a collection of information, then the analogy of a computer's memory is helpful, for we can say that knowledge about something is like the storage of meaningful and true strings of symbols in a computer.
We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.
Well, I will say this. And this is the main thing to remember. Macroeconomics — even with all of our computers and with all of our information — is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science. It can be better or it can be worse, but there isn't guaranteed predictability in these matters.
Whether computers are used for engineering design, medical data processing, composing music, or other purposes, the structure of computing is much the same. We are extremely short of talented people in this field, and so we need departments, curricula, and research and degree programs in computer science… I think of the Computer Science Department as eventually including experts in Programming, Numerical Analysis, Automata Theory, Data Processing, Business Games, Adaptive Systems, Information Theory, Information Retrieval, Recursive Function Theory, Computer Linguistics, etc., as these fields emerge in structure… Universities must respond [to the computer revolution] with far reaching changes in the educational structure.
If you think about things that happen, as being computations… a computation in the sense that it has definite rules… You follow them many steps and you get some result. …If you look at all these different computations that can happen, whether… in the natural world… in our brains… in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is how do these computations compare. …Are there dumb …and smart computations, or are they somehow all equivalent? …[T]he thing that I …was …surprised to realize from …experiments …in the early 90s, and now we have tons more evidence for …[is] this …principle of computational equivalence, which basically says that when one of these computations …doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached this …equivalent layer of computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? …You might say that …I'm studying this tiny little program …and my brain is surely much smarter …I'm going to be able to systematically outrun [it] because I have a more sophisticated computation …but …the principle …says …that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. …It means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no …shortcut …that jumps to the answer.
You and I we exist for ourselves, fundamentally. We should care about others but each human being is a source of value, each human being deserves things. And so if you lose control over your computing, that's bad for you, directly bad for you. So my first reaction is to say: Oh, what a shame; I hope you recover the control over your computing and the way you do that is to stop using the non-free software.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
We need to ask ourselves not only what computers can do, but what computers should do.
I think computer viruses should count as life … I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
We will learn that computers, amazing as they are, still cannot come close to being as effective as human beings. A computer isn't creative on its own because it is programmed to behave in a predictable way. Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.