People From Chicago

"Much of present science rests on engineering tools, and as time goes on, engineering seems to involve more and more of the science part. ...the two fields are growing together! ...and now there is not enough time to allow us the leisure which comes from separating the two fields."

"It is obvious: The past was once the future and the future will become the past."

"Often it is not physical limitations... but rather it is human made laws, habits, and organizational rules, regulations, personal egos, and inertia, which dominate the evolution of the future."

"It is probable that the future will be more limited by the slow evolution of the human animal and the corresponding human laws, social institutions, and organizations than it will be by the rapid evolution of technology."

"Unforeseen technological inventions can completely upset the most careful predictions."

"In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen? In a sense the first is Science... The second is Engineering.. The third is ethics, morals, or... value judgements. ...you will probably have an idea of how to alter things to make the more desirable future occur ...having a vision is what tends to separate the leaders from the followers."

"The standard process of organizing knowledge into departments, and subderpartments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses."

"You ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably... the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal... A life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living. ...a life without such a goal... is merely existing..."

"Transmission through space (typically signaling) is the same as transmission through time (storage)."

"The more complex the designed system the more field maintenance must be central to the final design. Only when field maintenance is part of the original design can it be safely controlled... This applies to both mechanical things and to human organizations."

"Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1950s in an address to the President and V.Ps of Bell Laboratories I said, "At present we are doing 1 out of 10 experiments on the computers and 9 in the labs, but before I leave it will be 9 out of 10 on the machines". They did not believe me... by now we do somewhere between 90% to 99% on the machines... And this trend will go on!"

"We must not forget, in all the enthusiasm for computer simulations, occasionally we must look at Nature as She is."

"The people at the bottom do not have the larger, global view, but at the top they do not have the local view of all the details, many of which can often be very important, so either extreme gets poor results."

"An idea which arises in the field, based on the direct experience of the people doing the job, cannot get going in a centrally controlled system... The not invented here (NIH) syndrome is one of the major curses of our society..."

"The Buddha told his disciples, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense". I say the same to you—you must assume the responsibility for what you believe."

"Unfortunately... the ADA language was designed by experts, and it shows all the non-humane features you can expect from them. It is... a typical Computer Science hacking job—do not try and understand what you are doing, just get it running. As a result of this poor psychological design... although a government contract may specify the programming be in ADA, probably over 90% will be done in FORTRAN, debugged, tested, and then painfully, by hand, be converted to a poor ADA program, with a high probability of errors!"

"The fundamentals of language are not understood to this day. ...Until we understand languages of communication involving humans as they are then it is unlikely many of our software problems will vanish."

"When you take a course in Euclidean geometry is not the teacher putting a... learning program into you? ...You enter the course and cannot do problems; the teacher puts into you a program and at the end of the course you can solve such problems. ...Are you sure you are not merely "programmed" in life by what by chance events happens to you?"

"We are beginning to find not only is intelligence not adequately defined so arguments can be settled scientifically, but a lot of other associated words like, computer, learning, information, ideas, decisions, expert behavior—all are a bit fuzzy..."

"This is the type of AI I am interested in—what can the human and machine do together, and not in the competition which can arise. ...There are doubts as to what fraction of the population can compete with computers, even with nice interactive prompting menus."

"The feeling of having free will is deep in us and we are reluctant to give it up for ourselves—but we are often willing to deny it to others!"

"We constantly use the word "simplify", but its meaning depends on what you are going to do next, and there is no uniform definition."

"Perhaps thinking should be measured not by what you do but by how you do it."

"I know that the great Hilbert said, "We will not be driven out of the paradise Cantor has created for us," and I reply, "I see no reason for walking in!" Indeed, in time, as more and more people get used to computers, I am inclined to believe that we here on this Earth will decide that the computable numbers are enough."

"Formal proofs, where there is deliberately no meaning, can convince only formalists, and of the results they themselves seem to deny any meaning. Is that to be the mathematics we are to use to understand the world we live in?"

"Most of us have grown so blase about computer developments and capabilities — even some that are spectacular — that it is difficult to believe or imagine there was a time when we suffered the noisy, painstakingly slow, electromechanical devices that chomped away on punched cards."

"Only by doing the best we can with the very best that an era offers, do we find the way to do better in the future."

"Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices."

"Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home."

"At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional … Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer. … This idea popularized by Professor Singer — that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species — is one whose time appears to have come. … What we’re seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others. … animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda."

"I think we in the mainstream media — especially cable television — sometimes bungled coverage of Trump. There was too much uncritical television coverage of Trump because he was good for ratings; then there was not enough investigation of his business dealings, racism and history of s, and too much false equivalency that equated the two candidates as equally flawed. More broadly, we in the mainstream media are out of touch with working-class America; we spend too much time chatting up senators, and not enough visiting unemployed steel workers. Yet for all of our sins in the mainstream media, these alt-right websites are both far more pernicious and increasingly influential."

"One takeaway from this astonishing presidential election is that fake news is gaining ground, empowering nuts and undermining our democracy."

"Since 9/11, I’ve spent way too much of my time in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Libya, and the U.S. approach in dealing with those security problems has been to rely on the military toolbox and blow things up. We’ve seen that that’s a very expensive toolbox, and I think we’ve underinvested in the women’s empowerment toolbox and the education toolbox, which are also imperfect but are also powerful tools to bring about change."

"Look, Trump has been elected, he will be our president and he has the right to choose conservatives. But instead of turning to the many principled Republicans available, he seems drawn to hotheads and bigots, embarrassing himself and our nation."

"Early signs of what the Trump administration may look like: A man associated with and misogyny will be chief strategist; a man rejected for a judgeship because of alleged racism will be attorney general; and an Islamophobe who has taken money from Moscow will be national security adviser. No, this is not satire."

"Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but a mark of civilization."

"The philosophy of science is concerned with how you decide if a scientific finding is correct or true. You have to establish criteria to determine if the finding or theory is valid. Validity is a fundamental problem in the philosophy of science, but the fundamental problem in the philosophy of scientific administration is the question of value. Two scientific activities are equally valid if they achieve results that are true. Now, how do you decide which activity is more valuable? The question of value is the basic question that the scientific administrator asks so that decisions can be made about funding priorities."

"As for the Internet, I tend to have profound doubts about the value of this communication advance to science. I wonder if, in an era of the Internet, we can have somebody like Eugene Wigner. Eugene Wigner's genius manifested itself in his ability to concentrate for a long time on a single idea. If you are constantly beset by outside ideas, can you really get to the true heart of the matter? It's a very different way of doing science."

"When you can't save yourself or your heart, it helps to be able to save face.”"

"Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.”"

"It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be."

"Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you."

"Two a.m.' He swallowed, then said, "You know. The person you can call at two a.m. and, no matter what, you can count on them. Even if they're asleep or it's cold or you need to be bailed out of jail...they'll come for you. It's like, the highest level of friendship.”"

"I mean, it's not surprising, really. Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It's, like, part of you for good."

"I was drowning in broad daylight and no one could tell."

"Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore."

"For two hours I'd felt myself stretching tighter and tighter, like a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping. And now, I could feel the smaller, weaker part of myself beginning to fray, tiny bits giving way before the big break."

"I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers."

"I was running from one problem or place to another, with no time left to study, or sleep, or just breathe. I felt pulled in all directions, fighting to keep all these obligations circling in the air above me. It was only a matter of time before something fell."

"I started crying again, my voice ragged. He told me to calm down. He told me it was going to be all right. And then, he told he'd be there soon.”"