"Something else has happened with computers"
About this Quote
“Something else has happened with computers” is a classic academic throat-clear that doubles as a quiet alarm bell. Seth Lloyd, a physicist who’s spent his career treating computation as a physical process, isn’t marveling at faster laptops. He’s signaling a category shift: computers stopped being mere tools that execute instructions and became environments that reorganize how knowledge, power, and even reality get processed.
The phrase works because it refuses to name the “something,” inviting the listener to supply their own unease or awe. That vagueness is strategic. It lets Lloyd point to multiple revolutions at once: the internet turning machines into networked social infrastructure; data and machine learning turning computation into prediction and persuasion; and, in his home turf, quantum information turning “computation” into a question about the universe’s deepest rules. In Lloyd’s world, computers don’t just model physics; they’re made of physics, and that makes their evolution feel like a shift in the ground beneath us.
The subtext is that our old metaphors are failing. We still talk about computers as boxes on desks, but the real computer is diffuse: servers, sensors, algorithms, markets, and people in feedback loops. “Something else” is the moment when computation becomes ambient and inescapable, when the decisive change isn’t speed but sovereignty: who gets to compute, what gets computed, and what gets quietly computed about us.
The phrase works because it refuses to name the “something,” inviting the listener to supply their own unease or awe. That vagueness is strategic. It lets Lloyd point to multiple revolutions at once: the internet turning machines into networked social infrastructure; data and machine learning turning computation into prediction and persuasion; and, in his home turf, quantum information turning “computation” into a question about the universe’s deepest rules. In Lloyd’s world, computers don’t just model physics; they’re made of physics, and that makes their evolution feel like a shift in the ground beneath us.
The subtext is that our old metaphors are failing. We still talk about computers as boxes on desks, but the real computer is diffuse: servers, sensors, algorithms, markets, and people in feedback loops. “Something else” is the moment when computation becomes ambient and inescapable, when the decisive change isn’t speed but sovereignty: who gets to compute, what gets computed, and what gets quietly computed about us.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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