Quotes from John Markoff

What will happen if our labor is no longer needed? If jobs for warehouse workers, garbage collectors, doctors, lawyers, and journalists are displaced by technology?

Gradually, he began to understand that the AI community was actually his philosophical enemy. After all, their vision was to replace humans with machines, while he wanted to extend and empower people.

I believe that sociable technology will always disappoint because it promises what it can't deliver," Turkle writes. "It promises friendship but can only deliver 'performances.' Do we really want to be in the business of manufacturing friends that will never be friends?

When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the benefit of any of the history and the research that had gone before it.

That is at the heart of the concept of "scale," which is very much a common denominator in motivating the region's programmers, hardware hackers, and venture capitalists. It is not enough to make a profit, or to create something that is beautiful. It has to have an impact. It has to be something that goes under 95 percent of the world's Christmas trees, or offers clean water or electricity to billions of people.

He offered his readers a quick tour of Vannevar Bush's Memex system and spent several pages discussing "associative linking" possibilities, a notion that was to serve as the forerunner of hypertext and led three decades later to the World Wide Web.

Not only had Stewart's mother gone to Vassar, but her sister and her mother were graduates as well. The school was legendary for its skeptical academic mantra, "Go to primary sources," an outlook that was repeatedly conveyed to Brand through the maternal side of his family.

The separation of the fields of AI and human-computer interaction, or HCI, is partly a question of approach, but it's also an ethical stance about designing humans either into or out of the systems we create.

There was an abyss between the original work done by Engelbart's group in the sixties and the motley crew of hobbyists that would create the personal-computer industry beginning in 1975.

A time of open scientific and technical experimentation, the period 1963 to 1969 was considered the "golden years" of AI.

Brand decided Koestler's framework was a good metaphor for his own life—not a carefully plotted arc of ambition, or even a narrative, but rather doing one different thing after another, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time and which, hopefully, would evolve into something profound.

Years later, lost in the glare of publicity surrounding PARC's accomplishments, the SAIL researchers failed to receive the credit that should have been given to their system.

As a former army officer, he felt he had knowledge the protesters didn't have. Moreover, his brother-in-law, Donald Sampson, had gone to fight in Southeast Asia. Brand wasn't for the war (he considered himself to be on the "psychedelic side" in the political dispute over Vietnam), but he had a basic sympathy for the enlisted men, and he bridled when he heard that protesters were calling them baby killers.

As the Vietnam War raged on and protests tore the country apart, Brand did his best to stay above the fray. When he set out to become a publisher in the fall of 1968, just months after Chicago police beat and tear-gassed protesters, he decreed the new publication would have nothing to say about the Vietnam War, and he stuck to what he believed was a no-politics editorial policy for the first three years he published the Catalog.

between 2007 and 2012 the U.S. workforce gained 387,000 managers while losing almost two million clerical jobs.

Dozens of the world's best computer scientists began their careers at SAIL. More than half a dozen companies including Foonly, Imagen, Xidex, Vicarm, Valid Logic, Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC, and Cisco Systems can trace their technology either directly or indirectly to SAIL.

While he had once been interested in Ayn Rand, he added, he increasingly viewed her laissez-faire capitalist worldview as old thinking. Now the ideas of Buckminster Fuller—pro-technology, with a deep faith that the coming of computerization and automation would result in an infinite abundance that would arrive shortly—were increasingly appealing to him.

one of the militants stood up and threatened to kill McCarthy. The experience only served to confirm his belief that if the student radicals ever ran the country, they would be no different than the Stalinist bureaucrats in the Soviet Union.

There is a fundamental distinction, however, between approaches to designing technology to benefit humans and designing technology as an end in itself. Today, that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.

Diffie was one of a legion of bright young men who, were it not for the Vietnam War, would probably not have considered the idea of military-funded basic research. But it seemed like a reasonable compromise when facing the equally dismal alternatives of being shipped to Indochina, fleeing to Canada, or going to jail.

At the start of the day he was given a dose of carbogen, a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen that was used as a benchmark at the clinic to determine how the subject might react to psychedelic drugs. The effect was immediate: as Brand later described it, he went to a "very interesting" other universe for what he thought must have been "seven eternities.

The human potential movement can be dated to the fall of 1962 in Big Sur, at what would soon be named the Esalen Institute.

Google's acquisition of an R & D company closely linked to the military instigated a round of speculation. Many suggested that Google, having bought a military robotics firm, might become a weapons maker. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his discussions with the technologists at the companies he was acquiring, Rubin sketched out a vision of robots that would safely complete tasks performed by delivery workers at UPS and FedEx.

Nevertheless, the DARPA Robotics Challenge did what it was designed to do: expose the limits of today's robotic systems.