David A. Mindell > Quotes

“A physical task becomes a visual display, and then a cognitive task. What once required strength now requires attention, patience, quick reactions.”
― David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

“In the real-time pressure of a lunar landing, an extensive social network of engineers focused on two men and a computer in an air-conditioned bubble, sitting on top of a rocket engine with a telescope and a control stick.”
― David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight

“lost a hydrogen bomb in the ocean near Spain,”
― David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

“where are the people? Which people? What are they doing? And when?”
― David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

“robots are “only one software upgrade away” from full autonomy, as Scientific American has recently argued.”
― David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

“A history of simulation technology in the space program has yet to be written, but it would show how the creation of virtual reality preceded, rather than responded to, the creation of real-time computer graphics”
― David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight

“Alvin dropped the bomb, which fell back down the seafloor to an even deeper, unknown position.”
― David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

“In space, great distances force us to spread out cognition over time, enabling us to see how autonomy maps across the solar system as distributed human presence. How we program our models of the world into autonomous systems here on earth is the subject of the next chapter.”
― David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

“the GSOP theoretically contained everything required in advance to produce the program code for each mission. In practice, the GSOPs tended to document code after it was written, rather than specifying it beforehand.”
― David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight

“When the astronauts in the LM interacted with the LM computer in the final phases of their descent, they were talking to a little piece of twenty-four-year-old Eyles’s brain.”
― David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight