If the predictions of some of the people in this book continue to be accurate, our whole environment will suddenly take on a kind of intelligence of its own sometime between now and the turn of the century. Fifteen years from now, there will be a microchip in your telephone receiver with more computing power than all the technology the Defense

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The reason for building a personal computer in the first place was to enable people to do what people do best by using machines to do what machines do best. Many people are afraid of today's computers because they have been told that these machines are smarter than they are

For the immediate future, the issue of whether machines can become intelligent is less important than learning to deal with a device that can become whatever we clearly imagine it to be.

if human knowledge is indeed power, then a device that can help us transform information into knowledge should be the basis for a very powerful technology

shared a vision of personal computing in which computers would be used to enhance the most creative aspects of human intelligence

hirty years ago, the overwhelming majority of the people who designed, manufactured, programmed, and used computers subscribed to a single idea about the proper (and possible) place of computers in society: "computers are mysterious devices meant to be used in mathematical calculations." Period. Computer technology was believed to be too fragile,

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People's lives changed radically and rapidly, not because of printing machinery, but because of what that invention made it possible for people to know. Books were just the vehicles by which the ideas escaped from the private libraries of the elite and circulated among the population.

Nobody knows whether this will turn out to be the best or the worst thing the human race has done for itself, because the outcome of this empowerment will depend in large part on how we react to it and what we choose to do with it. The human mind is not going to be replaced by a machine, at least not in the foreseeable future, but there is little... See more