The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

I’d dedicated my career to trying to understand the nature of the mind; among the greatest honors of my life was the chance to better know the nature of his.

It was a map of human meaning itself, uncompromising in both the scope of its reach and the veracity of its contents.

The founding ideals of this country, however imperfectly they’ve been practiced in the centuries since, seemed as wise a foundation as any on which to build the future of technology: the dignity of the individual, the intrinsic value of representation, and the belief that human endeavors are best when guided by the many, rather than the few.

But if we were to broaden our vision for AI to explicitly include a positive impact on humans and communities—if our definition of success could include such things—I was convinced that AI could change the world for the better.

It suggested that even the most complex ideas were something to share, graciously, rather than secrets to hoard.

The private life I’d worked so hard to separate from my journey as a scientist had burst through the dam, washing over everything in its path. It was long overdue.

of the connections between them. They tapped into our millennia-old desire to understand the mind—indeed, to make sense of intelligence itself—wading further into abstraction than I’d ever ventured, all while they maintained an unmistakably humanistic thread. They exemplified the virtues of science—rigorous and hypothesis-driven—but without ever sa

I had to remind myself—sometimes repeatedly—that I wasn’t merely a visitor in this place.

If my father was responsible for the magnitude of my curiosity, it was my mother who gave it direction. Like his, her personality sprang from a tension between who she was and who the world expected her to be.