Quotes from Ed Finn

From the day I met you, I've known that you are a glass-half-empty-and-maybe-poisonous guy.

We had to stop building things for a generation, just to absorb—to get saturated with—the mentality that everything's networked, smart, active. Which enables us to build things that would have been impossible before, like you couldn't build skyscrapers before steel." I nodded

Women of bad intent went up there to seek evil men. Evil children were born.

Innovation can't happen without accepting the risk that it might fail.

What might happen when people denied education because of their gender, their religion, their race, or their social strata learn about the world, about science, about history, about how other people live? What will happen to the way things are if the thinking of a lot of people changes?

Who is this guy?" "One of the founders of Wegetit," murmured Jeffrey. "Got his start in something called Structured Dialogic Design.

Indeed the most prevalent set of metaphors seems to be that of code as structure: platforms, architectures, objects, portals, gateways. This serves to both depersonify software, diluting the notion of software agency (buildings are passive; it's the architects, engineers, and users who act), and reifying code as an objective construct, like a building, that exists in the world.

The Tower of Babel didn't work out well for anyone involved, but like the bulk of the Bible, that story was just a fairy tale, and a pretty boring one at that.

At the same time, we are hard at work constructing intimacy with algorithms, from our willingness to play along with Siri to the things we type into search bars when we think nobody is looking.

Somewhere out there, there's a thing so amazing that you can devote your life to it and never forget how special it is.

In this regard it is perhaps appropriate to suggest instead that science fiction is the literature where we keep the beautiful ideas and throw out the data . . . namely, where we are free to conjure new realities that conform to our ideas. So it is that I am often unimpressed when people claim that science fiction anticipates science. It doesn't. The imagination of the natural world far exceeds that of even the most gifted science fiction writer.