There have been people willing to predict the future of technology ever since the first technologies were developed. Since the creation of computers, however, we’ve seen an explosion in both the pace of innovation and the volume of prognostication on all sorts of technology trends.
We think there’s a lot to be learned from some of the best and brightest people in the industry, which is why we’ve put together a list of 48 quotes on cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things. Some are optimistic, some suggest caution, and a few are just silly. We hope you’ll enjoy them!
The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing. – Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the graphical interface and the mouse
Cloud computing is the third wave of the digital revolution. – Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon
AI and its offshoot, machine learning, will be a foundational tool for creating social good as well as business success. – Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle
Digital technology, pervasively, is getting embedded in every place: every thing, every person, every walk of life is being fundamentally shaped by digital technology — it is happening in our homes, our work, our places of entertainment. It’s amazing to think of a world as a computer. I think that’s the right metaphor for us as we go forward. – Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn’t mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that’s as smart as we are? – Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute
The Internet of Things is not a concept; it is a network, the true technology-enabled network of all networks. – Edewede Oriwoh, IoT researcher
As the Internet of Things advances, the very notion of a clear dividing line between reality and virtual reality becomes blurred, sometimes in creative ways. – Geoff Mulgan, CEO of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts
If you look back over the history of computing, it started as mainframes or terminals. As PCs or work stations became prevalent, computing moved to the edge, and we had applications that took advantage of edge computing and the CPU and processing power at the edge. Cloud computing brought things back to the center. – Peter Levine, venture capital investor
The cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing. – Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware and Pivotal
Where a calculator like ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1.5 tons. – Popular Mechanics, March 1949
I predict that, because of artificial intelligence and its ability to automate certain tasks that in the past were impossible to automate, not only will we have a much wealthier civilization, but the quality of work will go up very significantly and a higher fraction of people will have callings and careers relative to today, – Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing. – Emo Phillips, comedian
If we do it right, we might actually be able to evolve a form of work that taps into our uniquely human capabilities and restores our humanity. The ultimate paradox is that this technology may become the powerful catalyst that we need to reclaim our humanity. – John Hagel, founder of Deloitte Center for the Edge
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. – Isaac Asimov, science fiction pioneer
Today, computing mainly automates things for you, but when we connect all these things, you can truly start assisting people in a more meaningful way. If I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that’s appropriate for them – Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
We are in a brave new world where not only do our children talk back to us, but so do our appliances. – Mohammed Dastagir, vice president and CTO, Sears Home Services
There was a time when every household, town, farm or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap; cloud computing works in a similar fashion. Just like water from the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off quickly as needed. Like at the water company, there is a team of dedicated professionals making sure the service provided is safe, secure and available on a 24/7 basis. When the tap isn’t on, not only are you saving water, but you aren’t paying for resources you don’t currently need. – Vivek Kundra, first CIO of the United States
Imagine if we can get information from sensors, compute it in the cloud, and find and plug water leakages – leakage wastes 20 percent water in the world. – Rajeev Suri, CEO of Nokia
What the Internet of Things is really about is information technology that can gather its own information. Often what it does with that information is not tell a human being something, it [just] does something. – Kevin Ashton, technology pioneer and creator of the term “Internet of Things”
The internet is no longer a web that we connect to. Instead, it’s a computerized, networked, and interconnected world that we live in. This is the future, and what we’re calling the Internet of Things. – Bruce Schneier, security technologist and author
We no longer have things with computers embedded in them. We have computers with things attached to them. Your modern refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold. Your oven, similarly, is a computer that makes things hot. An ATM is a computer with money inside. Your car is no longer a mechanical device with some computers inside; it’s a computer with four wheels and an engine. Actually, it’s a distributed system of over 100 computers with four wheels and an engine. – Bruce Schneier
The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It’s an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost. – Bruce Sterling, science fiction author and pioneer of the cyberpunk genre
Whenever I hear people saying AI is going to hurt people in the future I think, technology can generally always be used for good and bad and you need to be careful about how you build it. If you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents, and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick. – Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. – Alan Turing, computer science pioneer, in 1947
It’s not artificial intelligence I’m worried about, it’s human stupidity. – Neil Jacobstein, chair of the AI and Robotics track at Singularity University
Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence. – Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM
Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on. – Larry Page, co-founder of Google and CEO of Alphabet
I think you’ll see AI integrated into most everything that comes to market, and I think it’ll be very exciting. – Mark Hurd
It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century — not just at chess or trivia questions, but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. – Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist and AI researcher
Much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type — quietly but meaningfully improving core operations. – Jeff Bezos
A lot of what people are calling “artificial intelligence” is really data analytics – in other words, business as usual. If the hype leaves you asking “What is A.I., really?”, don’t worry, you’re not alone. – Om Malik, founder of GigaOM
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. – Edsger W. Dijkstra, computer science pioneer
Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It’s really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition. – Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity and CEO of Kitty Hawk
Our computers have become windows through which we can gaze upon a world that is virtually without horizons or boundaries. – Joseph B. Wirthlin, Mormon Church leader
With a trillion sensors embedded in the environment — all connected by computing systems, software and services — it will be possible to hear the heartbeat of the Earth, impacting human interaction with the globe as profoundly as the Internet has revolutionized communications, says Peter Hartwell, CTO of TDK InvenSense
The internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission, you are interacting with the things going on in the room. – Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google
One of the myths about the Internet of Things is that companies have all the data they need, but their real challenge is making sense of it. In reality, the cost of collecting some kinds of data remains too high, the quality of the data isn’t always good enough, and it remains difficult to integrate multiple data sources. – Chris Murphy, Director of Cloud Content at Oracle
The connectivity of the cloud and the prevalence of tablets and smartphones have eroded the traditional online/offline divide. Within a short time we will most probably stop thinking of it as “online.” We will simply be connected, all the time, everywhere, and the online world will be notable only by its absence when that connection breaks. – David Amerland, author and digital strategist
The cloud has become the next-generation supercomputer, and the smartphone has provided the revolution to spur its use. – Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo!
“The cloud” is effectively an augmentation of our brains’ memories. – John Gruber, UI designer and technology writer
Cloud computing is empowering, as anyone in any part of world with internet connection and a credit card can run and manage applications in the state of the art global datacenters; companies leveraging cloud will be able to innovate cheaper and faster. – Jamal Mazhar, head of infrastructure at Sprinklr
Connected devices and the internet of things will monitor our activities and upload that data. This will be factored into an algorithm to generate an overall score, which can increase or decrease in real-time. People will be able to see their overall fitness going up and down as they’re working out at the gym or eating takeaway pizza and watching Netflix. – Emmanuel Fombu, medical futurist
The appeal of wearable technology is down to the rich data generated by the devices, which is stored and analyzed in the cloud. The ability to access these insights from the cloud — anywhere, anytime -enables wearable technology users to boost their intelligence, confidence, health, fitness and even their love lives. – Chris Brauer and Jennifer Barth, the Centre for Creative and Social Technology
Things like chatbots, machine learning tools, natural language processing, or sentiment analysis are applications of artificial intelligence that may one day profoundly change how we think about and transact in travel and local experiences. – Gillian Tans, CEO of Booking.com
We’re entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. – Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and originator of the term “web 2.0”
There’s too much data today and there will be too much data in the future by a factor of a thousand. – Ben Hoffman, CEO of Movimento
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window. – Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple
