"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers"
About this Quote
Picasso’s jab lands because it reverses the usual brag about intelligence: answers aren’t the prize, they’re the cheap part. Anyone can accumulate solutions once the problem has been framed. The real artistic power - the thing Picasso spent a lifetime defending - is the ability to decide what the question even is, and which questions are worth the risk of asking.
On its face, the line is a provocation aimed at the rising mid-century cult of technology and rational mastery. Computers, in the public imagination, were becoming oracles: machines that could out-calculate human fallibility. Picasso punctures that awe by calling them “useless,” a deliberately excessive word that signals he’s not making a technical claim. He’s making a cultural one. A computer can optimize, predict, and compute, but it can’t hunger, doubt, or misbehave. It can’t choose to deform a face the way Cubism does to reveal a truer psychological geometry. It can’t decide that the “correct” perspective is the enemy of seeing.
The subtext is also a defense of ambiguity. Picasso’s work thrives on the unresolved: the multiple angles, the simultaneous truths, the refusal to settle. Answers close doors; questions keep a room alive. In that sense, the quote reads less like anti-tech snobbery and more like a warning about what modernity rewards: clean outputs over messy inquiry, efficiency over imagination.
It’s a reminder that creativity isn’t about generating results. It’s about generating the conditions for surprise.
On its face, the line is a provocation aimed at the rising mid-century cult of technology and rational mastery. Computers, in the public imagination, were becoming oracles: machines that could out-calculate human fallibility. Picasso punctures that awe by calling them “useless,” a deliberately excessive word that signals he’s not making a technical claim. He’s making a cultural one. A computer can optimize, predict, and compute, but it can’t hunger, doubt, or misbehave. It can’t choose to deform a face the way Cubism does to reveal a truer psychological geometry. It can’t decide that the “correct” perspective is the enemy of seeing.
The subtext is also a defense of ambiguity. Picasso’s work thrives on the unresolved: the multiple angles, the simultaneous truths, the refusal to settle. Answers close doors; questions keep a room alive. In that sense, the quote reads less like anti-tech snobbery and more like a warning about what modernity rewards: clean outputs over messy inquiry, efficiency over imagination.
It’s a reminder that creativity isn’t about generating results. It’s about generating the conditions for surprise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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