Scientists

"Should not a true understanding of life promote care for the future along with the present? This is the immediate duty of every scientist. Until now scientists have dealt with life as finite — is it not now their mission to see life as extending into Infinity? 553."

"Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory. In many instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intrusion from other disciplines would compete unfairly for limited financial resources and thus diminish their own opportunity for research."

"Many people, including many important and well-respected scientists, just don’t want there to be anything beyond nature. They don’t want a supernatural being to affect nature."

"For a man of science to refuse an opportunity to investigate any new phenomenon, whether it comes to him in the shape of a man from the moon, or a ghost from the Eddy homestead, is alike reprehensible. (5)"

"Scientists today … have to be able to interpret their findings just as skillfully as they conduct their research. If not, a lot of priceless new knowledge will have to wait for a better man."

"As long as scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems."

"There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow."

"Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

"In many professions sexual misconduct is now cause for dismissal. In the sciences, not so much. What’s more, many science workplaces use legal definitions of sexual harassment to set the standard for workplace conduct. If that is the bar that has to be met for a disgusting behavior to be considered actionable by a university, research institute, or field station, it is a high one. An enormous range of disrespectful and even frightening behavior can slip under that bar, even though it damages the careers of victims and bystanders, holding back scientific advancement."

"Scientists and doctors to me, are at the leading edge of what all human beings do all of the time; which is to change, everything. We’ve never been satisfied with what we’re given. We don’t accept the earth as a given. We change our body chemistry, our physiology, our biology, our biochemistry. We clear the forest, we build our own environment, we climate control it . . . And, the interface between that impulse and the human body often is doctors, biologists, and biochemists."

"What is a scientist after all? It is a curious person looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on."

"[S]cientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects. And statistical analysis eliminates the suspicion (or at least measures the likelihood) that the apparent effect might have happened by chance alone..."

"Ingenious? Yes. And scrupulous. Really good scientists have to be both."

"Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results."

"So many people today — and even professional scientists — seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest."

"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair..."

"The genuine scientist is not moved by praise or blame, nor does he preach. He unveils the universe and people come eagerly, without being pushed, to behold a new revelation: the order, the harmony, the magnificence of creation! And as man becomes conscious of the stupendous laws that govern the universe in perfect harmony, he begins to realize how small he is. He sees the pettiness of human existence, with its ambitions and intrigues, its 'I am better than thou' creed. This is the beginning of cosmic religion within him; fellowship and human service become his moral code. And without such moral foundations, we are hopelessly doomed."

"Everyone here would die for the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal gain. This is what it means to be a scientist."

"We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it."

"Until scientific inquiry came of age, human beings could not comprehend their relationship to the physical world, so they invented their own explanations. These explanations tended to be simplistic and in many cases, harmful. For example, if one knows a tidal wave is approaching and chooses to stay and pray for deliverance rather than leaving, this could be detrimental to his/her survival... Scientists ask the question “what do we have here?” and then they proceed to do experiments to determine the nature of the physical world... What is considered appropriate behavior today may be considered un-sane in the future... Better values, ideals, and behavior cannot be fully realized while there is still hunger, unemployment, deprivation, war, and poverty."

"Most scientists, however, have more respect for narrative. Nobel Prize winners Steven Weinberg, Frank Wilczek, and George Smoot, notable theoreticians Stephen Hawking, Lee Smolin, Leonard Susskind, Lisa Randall, Steven S. Gubser, Brian Greene, and many others have written accessible books that utilize the capacities of natural language and narrative to represent the contemporary scientific picture of space and time. They are following the example of Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species (1859) was written in the educated layman's idiom of his day, and even Albert Einstein, parts of whose Relativity (1920) may be understood without mathematical training."

"My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead “mildly guilty now and then” to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature's factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions."

"... I would say the general challenge for the next generation of scientists is to: (1) Find your passion ... and number (2) to feel responsible for helping others appreciate the value and wonder of science ..."

"I do not like to see all the fine boys turning to the study of law, instead of to the study of science or technology. … Japan wants no more lawyers now; and I think the professions of literature and of teaching give small promise. What Japan needs are scientific men; and she will need more and more of them every year."

"By a recent estimate, nearly half the bills before the U.S. Congress have a substantial science-technology component and some two-thirds of the District of Columbia Circuit Court’s case load now involves review of action by federal administrative agencies; and more and more of such cases relate to matters on the frontiers of technology. If the layman cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite. … [The fundamental question becomes] are we still capable of self-government and therefore freedom? Margaret Mead wrote in a 1959 issue of Daedalus about scientists elevated to the status of priests. Now there is a name for this elevation, when you are in the hands of—one hopes—a benevolent elite, when you have no control over your political decisions. From the point of view of John Locke, the name for this is slavery."

"The Thinker said, “There will come a new scientist, bold and unlimited.” (934)"

"The emergence of Einstein as a world figure in 1919 is a striking illustration of the dual impact of great scientific innovators on mankind. They change our perception of the physical world and increase our mastery of it. But they also change our ideas. The second effect is often more radical than the first. The scientific genius impinges on humanity, for good or ill, far more than any statesman or warlord. Galileo's empiricism created the ferment of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century which adumbrated the scientific and industrial revolutions. Newtonian physics formed the framework of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and so helped to bring modern nationalism and revolutionary politics to birth. Darwin's notion of survival of the fittest was a key element in both the Marxist concept of class warfare and the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism. Indeed the political and social consequences of Darwinian ideas have yet to work themselves out, as we shall see throughout this book. So, too, the public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture."

"I think all the scientists that I've worked with have been pretty remarkable people in terms of their scientific ability. They have not always been the most gentle people, kindliest people in dealing with their colleagues or their staffs, and so on. And some of them, I guess, have gotten to the top of the ladder by stepping over bodies. But you find that in any field. There are rascals in every profession, and scientist are no different in this respect of fighting their way to the top and even using their claws if necessary."

"Scientists are supposed to live in ivory towers. Their darkrooms and their vibration-proof benches are supposed to isolate their activities from the disturbances of common life. What they tell us is supposed to be for the ages, not for the next election. But the reality may be otherwise."

"Science for its part speaks against the special importance of any object of science, including human beings. … Science as opposed to religion recognizes nothing sacred either outside man or within him. But collectively, science is the assertion of man over non-man, surely an unembarrassed claim to importance and rule. Yet as individuals, scientists are anonymous factors in the scientific enterprise, each one substitutable for another. For all science cares, scientists could as well be numbered as named."

"Our problem is : What are the underlying desires or wishes, that lead some scientists to insist upon mechanistic conceptions, and others equally eminent, to espouse some form of scientific vitalism ? For in psychology, as in other sciences, a materialistic or vitalistic bias may be found at the root of nearly all factional schools, or contentious groups. Sometimes, of course, the underlying desire relates solely to the advancement of the personal fortunes of the workers concerned ; and such purely egoistic motives probably play a considerable part in the evolution of every scientific doctrine. In addition to this, however, originators and promulgators of conceptual systems of thought, nearly always possess hidden desires to push science in this direction or that, " for science's own sake ". The goal selected is the one that accords most closely with the basic emotional set of the scientific agitator. And the emotional sets of scientists may be classified, broadly, into two elementary groups, materialistic and vitalistic."

"A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries."

"The creative scientist lives in a 'wildness of logic,' where reason is the handmaiden and not the master."

"There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors."

"Some 500,000 scientists all over the world are devoting their knowledge to the search for weaponry more sophisticated and more deadly."

"A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge."

"A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature."

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp."

"A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps."

"In contrast to composers, there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest."

"Perhaps it is my job to offend some scientists. I'm not asking them to be reckless or unprofessional, but I do want to reinforce a sense of urgency."

"In schools, for example, there are courses in the criticism of literature, art criticism, and so forth. The arts are supposed to be 'not real.' It is quite safe, therefore, to criticize them in that regard -- to see how a story or a painting is constructed, or more importantly, to critically analyze the structure of ideas, themes, or beliefs that appear, say, in the poem or work of fiction. When children are taught science, there is no criticism allowed. They are told, 'This is how things are.' Science's reasons are given as the only true statements about reality, with which no student is expected to quarrel. Any strong intellectual explorations or counter versions of reality have appeared in science fiction, for example. Here scientists, many being science-fiction buffs, can channel their own intellectual questioning into a safe form. 'This is, after all, merely imaginative and not to be taken seriously.'"

"One outstanding American scientist when asked how he pictured heaven gave a fine answer, "It is what scientists call the true world, and our earthly world is but its reflection." (One could have added—a dreadfully distorted reflection.) This is a truly Eastern explanation."

"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."

"It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."

"This is a classic case of what is often called physics envy, the disease among scientists where the behavioral biologists fear their discipline lacks the rigor of physiology, the physiologists wish for the techniques of the biochemists, the biochemists covet the clarity of the answers revealed by molecular biologists, all the way down the down until you get to the physicists, who confer only with God."

"I've been aware for some time of the shortcomings inherent in the sane, dispassionate thinking that we scientists advocate. People don’t pay any attention."

"... Professor Watson ... has an eye for the significant detail which will bring a scene alive. No sense of false modesty prevents him from saying what he thinks of other scientists. He points out — let us face it, not without truth — that most scientists are stupid, and that most of them are working on trivial problems."

"As a result of scientific man's creativity there arises an ordered, illumined, determined world, imprinted with the stamp of creative intellect, of pure reason and clear cognition. From the midst of the order and lawfulness we hear a new song, the song of the creature to the Creator, the song of the cosmos to its Maker."

"When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?"

"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes."

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

"Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects."

"The scientists never make any money. They are always deluded into thinking that they live in a just universe that will reward them for their work and for their inventions. And this is probably the fundamental delusion that scientists tend to suffer from in our society."

"The degree of scientific knowledge existing in an early period of society was much greater than the moderns are willing to admit but, it was confined to the temples, carefully veiled from the eyes of the people and opposed only to the priesthood."

"The older the scientist you choose to do your Ph.D. thesis with, the more likely you will find yourself working in a field that saw its better days a long time ago, possibly before you were born. Even when a mature scientist still has all his marbles, he often wants to put more bricks into an edifice that already has enough rooms. ... Young professors in contrast are generally hired not for grandeur but because they represent a new intellectual thrust not present in a department, one with hopes of remaining lively over at least the next decade. Moreover, they are likely to have smaller research groups than more senior professors, around whom funds as well as stodgier minds tend to aggregate."

"It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell."

"Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study."

"No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

"… it is shameful that there are so few women in science... In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine."

".. When an individual, e.g. higher forms of animals, thinks, it is always for his own advantage whether the resulting action or expression is favorable or not to the onlookers or observers."

"It is you who judges who you are. In this way, the judgment is accurate."

"Made-Up Minds addresses fundamental questions of learning and concept invention by means of an innovative computer program that is based on the cognitive-developmental theory of psychologist Jean Piaget. Drescher uses Piaget’s theory as a source of inspiration for the design of an artificial cognitive system called the schema mechanism, and then uses the system to elaborate and test Piaget’s theory. The approach is original enough that readers need not have extensive knowledge of artificial intelligence, and a chapter summarizing Piaget assists readers who lack a background in developmental psychology."

"The schema mechanism learns from its experiences, expressing discoveries in its existing representational vocabulary and extending that vocabulary with new concepts. A novel empirical learning technique, marginal attribution, can find results of an action that are obscure because each occurs rarely in general, although reliably under certain conditions. Drescher shows that several early milestones in the Piagetian infant’s invention of the concept of persistent object can be replicated by the schema mechanism."

"Many scientists suspect that the universe can ultimately be described by a simple (perhaps even deterministic) formalism; all that is real unfolds mechanically according to that formalism. But how, then, is it possible for us to be conscious, or to make genuine choices? And how can there be an ethical dimension to such choices? Drescher sketches computational models of consciousness, choice, and subjunctive reasoning—what would happen if this or that were to occur?—to show how such phenomena are compatible with a mechanical, even deterministic universe. Analyses of Newcomb’s Problem (a paradox about choice) and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (a paradox about self-interest vs. altruism, arguably reducible to Newcomb’s Problem) help bring the problems and proposed solutions into focus. Regarding quantum mechanics, Drescher builds on Everett’s relative-state formulation—but presents a simplified formalism, accessible to laypersons—to argue that, contrary to some popular impressions, quantum mechanics is compatible with an objective, deterministic physical reality, and that there is no special connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness."

"I am a Professor Emeritus in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (SCS). That means I am formally retired, but still active in research, advising, and departmental activities. My home department is the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). I am also emeritus faculty in the Computer Science Department (CSD)."

"As a researcher, I am primarily interested in Artificial Intelligence and its applications. I have worked in many areas of AI: planning, knowledge representation and reasoning, image processing, natural language processing, document classification, artificial neural networks, and the use of massively parallel machines to solve AI problems. I am also interested in the use of AI techniques to build better user interfaces and context-aware systems."

"Currently, I am working on Scone, a practical Knowledge Base System (KBS) that can represent a large body of real-world knowledge and that can efficiently perform the kinds of search and inference that seem so effortless for us humans. This work is based in part on the NETL system that I developed for my Ph.D. thesis in the late 1970s, but the Scone system is designed to run on standard laptops, desktop machines, and servers rather than on special parallel hardware."

"My research group has worked on a number of applications of Scone, with a special focus on using Scone to support knowledge-based natural language understanding and generation. I believe that Scone-like knowledge base systems will be important tools in the future, perhaps used in even more ways than database systems are used today."

"I am also working on some ideas for new learning architectures for deep-learning networks, inspired in part by the Cascade Correlation architecture that I developed in 1990 with Chris Lebiere."

"I was one of the core developers of the Common Lisp language, and my research group developed the CMU Common Lisp implementation which formed the basis for many commercial Common Lisp systems, and now is maintained as open-source software, along with a split-off version, Steel Bank Common Lisp."

"In 1982, I proposed the use of :-) and :-( in posts and Email messages. These are generally regarded as the first internet emoticons, and the text-only ancestors of today’s graphical emojis."

"In 1994 an amazing thing happened. The phone rings and it is Professor Sheila Widnall of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of MIT. She said, "Do you know anyone who wants to be Chief Scientist of the Air Force? And by the way, if you are interested let me know." She had been chosen to be Secretary of the Air Force, and she was looking for her Chief Scientist. I thought about it briefly, told her yes, and stayed for three years."

"My job was to be a window on science for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. I was the first person to be asked to be Chief Scientist who was not an Aero-Astro person, a weapons person, or from the physical sciences. There had not been any computer scientists before me."

"I did two big things. One was consciousness-raising in the Air Force about software. The one big report I wrote, at the end of my term, was a report called, It’s a Software-First World. The Air Force had not realized that. They probably still do not think that. They think it is an airframe-based world."

"The other was on software development. The military up to that point believed in, and could only imagine, a structured-programming top-down world. You set up requirements, you get a contractor to break down the requirements into blocks, another contractor breaks them down into mini-blocks, and down at the bottom there are some people writing the code. It takes years to do. When it all comes back up to the top, (a) it’s not right, and (b) it’s not what you want anymore. They just didn’t know how to contract for cyclical development. Well, I think we were able to help them figure out how to do that."

"It was a rather unsettling experience to come back to Stanford. After playing a role on a big stage, all of a sudden you come back and your colleagues ask,"

"So at the beginning of 2000, I retired. Since then I have been leading a wonderful life doing whatever I please. Now that I have a lot more time than I had before, I’m getting geekier and geekier. It feels like I’m 10 years old again, getting back involved with details of computing."

"The great thing about being retired is not that you work less hard, but that what you do is inner-directed. The world has so many things you want to know before you’re out of here that you have a lot to do."

"When I was younger, I was too busy for history and not cognizant of the importance of it. As I got older and began to see my own career unfolding, I began to realize the impact of the ideas of others on my ideas. I became more and more of a history buff."

"That convinced me to get very serious about archives, including my own. If you’re interested in discoveries and the history of ideas, and how to manufacture ideas by computer, you’ve got to treat this historical material as fundamental data. How did people think? What alternatives were being considered? Why was the movement from one idea to another preposterous at one time and then accepted"

"Our group, the Heuristic Programming Project, did path-breaking work in the large, unexplored wilderness of all the great scientific theories we could possibly have. But most of that beautiful wilderness today remains largely unexplored. Am I am happy with where we have gotten in induction research? Absolutely not, although I am proud of the few key steps we took that people will remember."

"I don’t believe there is a general pattern recognition problem. I believe that pattern recognition, like most of human reasoning, is domain specific. Cognitive acts are surrounded by knowledge of the domain, and that includes acts of inductive behavior. So I don’t really put much hope in "general anything" for AI. In that sense I have been very much aligned with Marvin Minsky’s view of a "society of mind." I’m very much oriented toward a knowledge-based model of mind."

"I think the only way is the way human culture has gotten there. We transmit our knowledge via cultural artifacts called texts. It used to be manuscripts, then it was printed text, now it’s electronic text. We put our young people through a lot of reading to absorb the knowledge of our culture. You don’t go out and experience chemistry, you study chemistry."

"We need to have a way for computers to read books on chemistry and learn chemistry. Or read books on physics and learn physics. Or biology. Or whatever. We just don’t do that today. Our AI programs are handcrafted and knowledge engineered. We will be forever doing that unless we can find out how to build programs that read text, understand text, and learn from text."

"Reading from text in general is a hard problem, because it involves all of common sense knowledge. But reading from text in structured domans I don’t think is as hard. It is a critical problem that needs to be solved."

"There are certain major mysteries that are magnificent open questions of the greatest import. Some of the things computer scientists study are not. If you’re studying the structure of data-bases—well, sorry to say, that’s not one of the big magnificent questions."

"I’m talking about mysteries like the initiation and development of life. Equally mysterious is the emergence of intelligence. Stephen Hawking once asked, "Why does the universe even bother to exist?" You can ask the same question about intelligence. Why does intelligence even bother to exist?"

"We should keep our "eye on the prize." Actually, two related prizes. One is that when we finish our job, whether it is 100 years from now or 200 years from now, we will have invented the ultra-intelligent computer. The other is that we will have a very complete model of how the human mind works. I don’t mean the human brain, I mean the mind: the symbolic processing system."

"In my view the science that we call AI, maybe better called computational intelligence, is the manifest destiny of computer science."

"For the people who will be out there years from now, the question will be: will we have fully explicated the theory of thinking in your lifetime? It would be very interesting to see what you people of a hundred years from now know about all of this."

"The dream of the intelligent machine is the vision of creating something that does not depend on having people preprogram its problem‐solving behaviour. Put another way, artificial intelligence (AI) should not seek to merely solve problems but should rather seek to solve the problem of how to solve problems. This chapter seeks to provide a focused explication of particular methods that indeed allow machines to improve themselves by learning from experience and to explain the fundamental theoretical and practical considerations of applying them to problems of machine learning. To begin this explication, the discussion first goes back to the Turing Test. The acceptance of the Turing Test focused attention on mimicking human behaviour. A human may be described as an intelligent problem‐solving machine. The idea of constructing an artificial brain or neural network has been proposed many times."

"It is a great honour to receive the LEO award, and I humbly would like to accept this on behalf of the South African information systems community. I would also like to acknowledge all who have made it possible for me to achieve my objectives during my academic career: my family - in particular, Annemarie, my dear wife of 45 years, my South African academic colleagues, and, especially, my students."

"“I always say I’m not born of tech. I did not start my career in tech — I began working at nonprofits, public policy organizations, and even as an economist. That breadth of experience gives me a perspective on technology that goes beyond the usual tech world.”"

"“When I joined Accenture for responsible AI, I saw the problem as a series of quantitative social science challenges. It was an amazing opportunity to think big, think globally, and start solving big problems"

"With generative AI, the public can now simply ask, ‘Why is it that when I ask for five scientists, I only get men?’ and that’s where change begins"

"In my TED talk, I argued that it’s not about building trustworthy tech. It’s about creating tools so that people can make choices for themselves — tools that let us shift the conversation on what technology should be"

"“I am a big open source advocate. Open source used to be the backbone of the tech industry — it made tech accessible by enabling people to learn from free code on GitHub. Of course, with that openness come security challenges, but its role in fostering innovation is undeniable"

"“When I founded Humane Intelligence, I purposely chose a nonprofit model. It was crucial for me to align with funders who cared about long-term, mission-oriented impact, rather than just chasing quarterly profits"

"“Quantitative social scientists belong on these teams — not just to philosophize, but to translate abstract policy mandates into measurable, technical specifications."

"“AI is borderless like air. We need global regulation to tackle it, yet recent trends suggest a future of ‘sovereign AI’ with fragmented approaches across nations"

"“The shortest answer to a better AI future is choice. People need the ability to decide which algorithms affect their lives — whether they’re users or creators"

"“The journey toward responsible AI is aspirational. It isn’t about reaching a final state of unbiased perfection once and for all; it’s about continuously evolving and building systems that empower choice"