The best computer is a man, and it's the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

The remark is a sardonic, mid‑century observation about the limits and economics of early computing. Calling a human “the best computer” plays on the older meaning of “computer” as a person who performs calculations, and it underscores that, in many real-world technical systems, human judgment, adaptability, and pattern-recognition can outperform rigid machines. The second clause—“mass-produced by unskilled labor”—adds dark humor: societies can generate large numbers of workers more easily than they can build sophisticated hardware, and they often treat people as interchangeable components in a production pipeline. Read this way, the quote critiques both technological hype and the dehumanizing industrial logic that reduces human intelligence to a cheap, scalable resource.