"The feeling of hunger was rejected as a stimulus for eating; instead, one ate when an abstract model had achieved a certain state, i.e., when the hands of a clock pointed to certain marks on the clock's face (the anthropomorphism here is highly significant too), and similarly for signals for sleep and rising, and so on."

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 25

"Yes, the computer did arrive "just in time." But in time for what? In time to save - and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize - social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them."

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 31

"That was the option man chose to exercise. The arrival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the Computer Age have been announced many times. But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measured in terms of the profundity of the social revisions it entrained, then there has been no computer revolution. And however the present age is to be characterized, the computer is not eponymic of it."

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 32

"If a particular technique requires an enormous amount of computation and if only a limited computational effort can be devoted to it, then a failure of the technique can easily be explained away on the ground that, because of computational limitations, it was never really tested."

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 35

"One programs, just as one writes, not because one understands, but in order to come to understand. Programming is an act of design. To write a program is to legislate the laws for a world one first has to create in imagination."

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 108

"Indeed, many professional programmers believe that their craft is difficult because the languages with which they must deal have rigid syntactical rules. There is therefore a persistent cry for natural-language, e.g., English, programming systems. Programmers who hold to this belief have probably never tackled a truly difficult problem, and have therefore never felt the need for really deep criticism from the computer."

Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 109

"A real reason that programming is very hard is that, in most instances, the computer knows nothing of those aspects of the real world that its program is intended to deal with. [...] It is in fact very hard to explain anything in terms of a primitive vocabulary that has nothing whatever to do with that which has to be explained. Yet that is precisely what most programs attempt to do."

Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 109

"A computer's successful performance is often taken as evidence that it or its programmer understand a theory of its performance. Such an inference is unnecessary and, more often than not, is quite mistaken."

Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 110

"Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems - the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world - may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest." (2/2)

Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 130-131

"If a theory written in natural language is, in fact, a set of patches and patches on patches, its lack of structure will be evident in its very composition. Although a computer program similarly constructed may reveal its impoverished structure to a trained reader, this kind of fault cannot be so easily seen in the program's performance. A program's performance, therefore, does not alone constitute an adequate validation of it as theory."

Computer Power and Human Reason, Weizenbaum, 1976, p152

"The public vaguely understands but is nonetheless firmly convinced that any effective procedure can, in principle, be carried out by a computer. [...] Indeed, on the basis of this unwarranted generalization of the words "effective" and "procedure," the word "understanding" is also redefined. To those fully in the grip of the computer metaphor, to understand X is to be able to write a computer program that realizes X."

Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 157

"When the computer is used merely as a numerical tool in psychology (or in any other field), it does not usually create a focusing of vision; i.e., it is not comparable to the microscope. It is therefore unrealistic to expect such use to uncover previously unseen worlds or to render distinct what was earlier seen only in vague outline."

Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 160

"That is why, for example, the computer expert who knows nothing but computers (the "Fach Idiot," as the Germans call such a person) can derive no broad intellectual nourishment from his expertise and is therefore doomed to remain forever a hacker. That is also why the computer metaphor is, as George Miller puts it, "most productive in areas where a considerable foundation of theory based on previous research already exists.""

Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 160