Цитаты

“There are two ways of finding inventions. One is to look at the science and technology and see what new powers it gives us. The laser was developed before the applications were found. It certainly wasn't invented with playing CDs in mind. The other is to look at human activities and problems and try to find what technology will help solve them. Both approaches are valid, and there are plenty of people to pursue both. In these pages we mostly follow the second approach, but there are some examples of just seeing what the technology will do.

As for science, there are always people who want to organize it to investigate questions leading to practical results. This is a bad idea, and has worked out badly every time it has dominated the funding of science. Science is hampered, and the practical results don't materialize. None of the important scientific discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, Gödel, Turing, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Watson and Crick were the result of a plan aimed at practical results. Neither Lisp nor time-sharing, ideas for which I have been given substantial credit, were the result of a committee deciding that these were worthwhile areas to investigate.”
— John McCarthy, The inventor of LISP and AI pioneer.