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DAVID FERRUCCI: I was in high school and I actually wanted to
become a medical doctor originally. And I got exposed
to a computer science class they were teaching at the local
college one summer, and I didn't know what to expect, but I got a
chance to actually program a computer for the first time and
I was completely blown away. And then the whole idea that you
can give a machine a set of instructions and it can carry
out these instructions and so the sky was the limit. Whatever
you can imagine, whatever you can imagine, how to solve a
problem, how to compute, how to think, you can get this computer
to follow that program that you can imagine, was just an amazing
thing. My mind immediately went to the idea of artificial
intelligence, and I was like where does it stop,
what can I get the computer to do, right? So it was just
overwhelming and exciting.
I guess in some it's humility and this was my father, I guess.
My father would give me this advice one time, don't always
assume you're correct, keep your mind open to all the
possibilities, don't assume you've got it all figured out at
any point in time. It's really a lesson in humility, I think.
The one I remember, probably, was trying to see how a plant
reacted to different vitamins and it's, feeding it different
vitamins in its water solution and probably what I remember
about that experiment at least, I don't remember what the plant
was or the vitamin was, but what resonated was the notion of a
control that, I mean, you have to test one variable at a time,
otherwise, you don't really know what's happening.
I just love to understand and discover and build things. In
fact, if anything, I'm probably a mix between a scientist and an
engineer. The scientist part wants to understand how things
work, so thinking about the human mind and how we think, and
that's just fascinating to me. The engineer part wants to build
things, wants to make things work and see what they can do
and how you can push the limits.
So to be an effective scientist, I think one of the things you
have to do is you have to balance objectivity and passion.
Right to be a good scientist you have to be objective. That
means you have to submit to truth, you have to submit to
logic. But you also have to be driven by passion, by emotion
and it's balancing that. I don't think you can get
real science done if you don't have people who are
excited about discovery.
Can you imagine if you got a computer to be able to read and
understand all the information that's produced out there and
then in order to help you create, in order to help you
learn, in order to help you make informed and intelligent
judgments, you can just communicate fluently with that
computer and start talking about what information you need, how
does it relate, how do you organize it, how do you
summarize it to make better decisions.
I was always very philosophical and going back to Socrates and
Plato but then as I got more and more into AI, it was a lot from
John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, and Ron Brachman and a lot of
the founders of artificial intelligence, the early
thinkers, how do we get computers to think and what does
it even mean for a computer to think. Terry Winograd. And the
field's been evolving for so long with so many really
great thinkers in it and those are the people, ultimately,
has influenced me.
There's a lot more emotion and passion in science than, I
think, most people want to believe. Science happens because
people are human and they have tremendous and deep desires to
discover, to learn, to be right, to be first. So you think, oh,
science is really dry, no, there are real people behind science
who are very excited and want to do great things.
So there's a guy on the team, Adam Lally, I would definitely
rescue him. He could implement just about any idea I could ever
come up with very, very quickly. I guess you meant thing. I
don't know, my laptop, I just instinctively go to my laptop
even though it's backed up you just, still you're so attached
to your computer, you know.
So I'm old. Ella Fitzgerald, I'm a classic jazz guy, I mean,
Frank Sinatra, Nora Jones, Diana Krall, things like that.