Science & Tech Quote by Roy Romer

Romer’s sentence is the sound of a politician hearing the future arrive and immediately translating it into a budget line item. The key move is the modesty: “I think,” “some kinds,” “less costly.” He’s not promising a techno-utopia; he’s staking out a defensible, appropriations-friendly claim that computers can make certain forms of thinking cheaper. That caution reads like a survival skill in public office, where overpromising on technology becomes a headline and underdelivering becomes a scandal.

“Interactive computers” matters. This isn’t the era of batch processing or back-office number crunching; it signals a shift toward systems that respond, guide, and simulate dialogue. Romer is reaching for a broader mandate: not just automating clerical work, but touching “inquiry,” “knowledge acquisition,” and even “reasoning.” The subtext is an institutional ambition: schools, agencies, and civic systems could scale expertise without scaling payroll. That’s a seductive proposition for governments facing rising costs, uneven access to quality education, and pressure to modernize.

The telling word is “method.” Framed this way, software isn’t culture or creativity; it’s infrastructure for cognition, a tool that can standardize and distribute the processes of learning and decision-making. There’s optimism here, but also a quiet politics: if reasoning can be packaged as an “interactive” system, then authority shifts. Expertise becomes less tied to credentialed humans and more to the tools institutions choose to deploy. That’s empowerment and risk in the same breath: democratized access, yes, but also the potential to smuggle assumptions into the machinery of “reasoning” under the neutral banner of cost savings.