Walter-Isaacson

The Ben Franklin of today is Elon Musk. The best bar in New Orleans is a tie: Snug Harbor and the Napoleon House. It depends on your mood and who's playing at Snug Harbor.

Yes. I was not very good at running CNN. I did not understand, nor have much passion for, television as a medium. So I didn't have a feel for what would work. I liked hiring great folks like Aaron Brown and Anderson Cooper and trying to do smarter TV, but I just don't think I was cut out for TV.

I tried very hard to get Steve to talk about software design -- especially the Darwin kernel in the NeXT OS and how it evolved into the Apple OS when he came back. But I could never, no matter how hard I tried, get him interested in reflecting on the details of software design.

I think it's wacky and outdated that we teach school math as a process leading up to calculus. That's a relic of the Sputnik era, when were were all going to calculate rocket trajectories. Instead, starting in fourth grade, I think we should be teaching mathematical logic, proofs, and algorithms. We should also emphasize statistics and probabilities. Every kid should be able to do Boolean algebra and formal logic, rather than getting mired in just traditional algebra. We should also teach programming languages, especially C++, but we need to make sure that kids are also comfortable with the theory and concepts of algorithms, which underpins all programming language. Also, like Ada Lovelace, we should learn that math is a beautiful thing to be visualized, and not just formulas to be memorized. When we see an equation or algorithm or logical sequence, we should visualize it just as we do a line of her dad's poetry, such as "she walks in beauty like the night."

The theme of my book is that human minds and computers bring different strengths to the party. The pursuit of strong Artificial Intelligence has been a bit of a mirage -- starting in the 1950s, it's always seen to be 20 years away. But the combination of humans and machines in more intimate partnership -- what JCR Licklider called symbiosis and what Peter Thiel calls complementarity -- has proven more fruitful. Indeed amazing. So I suspect that for the indefinite future, the combination of human minds and machine power will be more powerful than aiming for artificial intelligence and a singularity.