“I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.”

Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything." by Madeleine L'Engle?
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Madeleine L'Engle223
American writer 1918–2007

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“In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. […] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.”

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&quot; Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/towards.html&quot;, Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28 <br class="br">1960s

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“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.”

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Context: Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

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“[Speaking of computers] But they are useless. They can only give you answers.”

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As discussed in this entry from Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/05/computers-useless/#more-2932, the origin seems to be the article &quot;Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview&quot; by William Fifield which appeared in The Paris Review 32, Summer-Fall 1964, and collected a number of interviews Fifield had done with Picasso. <br class="br">Common later variant: &quot;Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.&quot; This variant seems to have arisen in the 1980s, the earliest known appearance in a book is Herman Feshbach, &quot;Reflections on the Microprocessor Revolution: A Physicist&#x27;s Viewpoint&quot;, in Man and Technology (1983), ed. Bruce M. Adkins, where the attribution is described as &quot;rumoured&quot;. http://books.google.com/books?id=9EohAQAAIAAJ&amp;q=Picasso <br class="br">1960s

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