" Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/towards.html", Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28
1960s
“I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.”
Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet
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Madeleine L'Engle 223
American writer 1918–2007Related quotes
Cameron Country, broadcast on BBC TV, July 12, 1969.
Midnight's Children (1981)
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.
“[Speaking of computers] But they are useless. They can only give you answers.”
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 "Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview" by William Fifield which appeared in The Paris Review 32, Summer-Fall 1964, and collected a number of interviews Fifield had done with Picasso.
Common later variant: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." This variant seems to have arisen in the 1980s, the earliest known appearance in a book is Herman Feshbach, "Reflections on the Microprocessor Revolution: A Physicist's Viewpoint", in Man and Technology (1983), ed. Bruce M. Adkins, where the attribution is described as "rumoured". http://books.google.com/books?id=9EohAQAAIAAJ&q=Picasso
1960s
Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 114.