Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the current limitations in effectively communicating with computers, highlighting a need for precision in instructions.
Richard P. Feynman suggests that while there may be a future where machines can understand vague or approximate instructions, our present reality requires us to be overly precise in how we interact with computers. This reflects on the complexities and challenges of programming and instructing machines accurately, stressing the importance of clarity in our communication.
In practice
This quote could be used in a technology conference to discuss advancements in AI.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens.
You can get it in any color, as long as it is black
Usability rules the web. Simply stated, if the customer can't find a product, then he or she will not buy it.
We have reason not to be afraid of the machine, for there is always constructive change, the enemy of machines, making them change to fit new conditions.
When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.
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