Danny Hillis Quotes

#1. I am convinced that we humans are just at the beginning of our journey, on our way to becoming something more wonderful than we can imagine.

Danny Hillis

#2. What we need is a plan B ... independent of the Internet. [It] doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department.

Danny Hillis

#3. The computers are in control. We just live in their world.

Danny Hillis

#4. Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.

Danny Hillis

#5. If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.

Danny Hillis

#6. We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.

Danny Hillis

#7. An attitude of only taking what you need was built into the protocols of the Internet itself.

Danny Hillis

#8. What people mean by the word "technology" is the stuff that doesn't really work yet.

Danny Hillis

#9. [Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

Danny Hillis

#10. Design: holding conflicting ideas in your head without difficulty

Danny Hillis

#11. A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

Danny Hillis