“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.”
"Computers"<!-- , p. 113 -->
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)
Context: The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.
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Lewis Thomas 31
American physician, poet and educator 1913–1993Related quotes
Paul M. Churchland (1996) The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain. MIT Press, 1996. p. 3
"The World of 1990" in The Diners' Club Magazine, January 1965
General sources
“Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer.”
Niklaus Wirth (1999) " A Digital Contrarian Retires http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt/mdlt79.htm". Beat Gerber eds., June 1999.
Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Alan Kay (1971) at a 1971 meeting of PARC http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/27/invent-the-future/
Similar remarks are attributed to Peter Drucker and Dandridge M. Cole.
Cf. Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future (1963): "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented."
Nigel Calder reviewed Gabor's book and wrote, "we cannot predict the future, but we can invent it..."
1970s
“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future”
The earliest citations of this proverb, from the mid-twentieth century, refer to it as Danish in origin. See http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/
Disputed, Misattributed