1608) The art of letters will come to an end before AD 2000 and there will be a sort of artistic dark ages till about AD 2700.

Ezra Pound
letter to his mother, Isabel Pound (1/1/1910)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section in
Wired (10/1995)

1609) Simply stated, the techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction.

Terry Winograd
"Thinking Machines: Can There Be? Are We?" in
The Boundaries of Humanity (1991)
James J. Sheehan, Morton Sosna, eds.
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section in
Wired (10/1995)

1610) "Psychic Litter" is a term I coined to mean acts of immorality so small as to be below the level of consciousness. One example is wasting small amounts of the time of many people. Bruce Tognazzini, the user interface guru, once opined that by creating a product that wastes a half hour of time for each of 4 million users, you waste 900 work-years of human productivity. That works out to about 12 complete lives.

David Joiner
"Psychic Litter"
Wired (10/1995)

1611) Programming is dreadfully impermanent; it's more like performance art than literature.

Bruce Sterling
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section in
Wired (10/1995)

1612) Consider the human form. It clearly isn't designed to be a scientist. Your mental capacity is extremely limited. You have to undergo all kinds of unnatural training to get your brain even half suited for this kind of work - and for that reason, it's hard work. You live just long enough to start figuring things out before your brain starts deteriorating. And then, you die.

Hans Moravec
quoted by Charles Platt in
"Super Humanism" in
Wired (10/1995)

1613) He was quiet, mostly kept to himself.

cliched reaction of neighbors to a serial killer,
used as part of an ad for Comedy Central's
Exit 57 TV show in
Wired (10/1995)