The following is a conversation with Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, one of the most popular programming languages in the world, used in almost any application that involves computers from web back end development to psychology, neuroscience, computer vision, robotics, deep learning, natural language processing, and almost any subfield of AI. This conversation is part of MIT course on artificial general intelligence and the artificial intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or your podcast provider of choice, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Your parents and the world around you was deeply deeply impacted by World War Two, as was my family from the Soviet Union. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Peter Bell out of that world, at least on the Soviet Union side in Europe, sort of out of suffering, out of challenge, out of that kind of set of traumatic events, often emerges beautiful art, music, literature. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And he wrote about it a lot, and very interesting, very good books, I thought, I think. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Peter Bell And looking at the trajectory through the rest of your life, has literature, Dutch or English or translation had an impact outside the technical world that you existed in? Guido van Rossum I still read novels. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| My work is highly technical and sort of the world of art and literature doesn't really directly have any bearing on it. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Peter Bell Right. Of course, you don't feel doesn't mean it's not somehow deeply there in your subconscious. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I maybe towards the end of my high school period, I felt confident enough that that I designed my own circuits that were sort of interesting somewhat. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| But I had a very naive model of, like, how do I build a circuit? Of, like, how a transistor works? And I don't think that in those days, I had any understanding of coils and capacitors, which actually sort of was a major problem when I started to build more complex digital circuits, because I was unaware of the sort of the analog part of the – how they actually work. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So in the 1970s, the personal computer was being born. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I was also not really interested in those things. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| The computer wasn't really connected to the real world. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And I don't even remember what my first forays into programming were, but they were sort of doing simple math exercises and just to learn how a programming language worked. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I don't think I really saw it that way. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Right. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So there was a Scientific American column by someone who did a monthly column about mathematical diversions. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And all I had was like the two pages photocopy of that article. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I essentially first on paper I designed a simple circuit built out of logic gates that took nine bits of input which is sort of the cell and its neighbors and produced a new value for that cell and it's like a combination of a half adder and some other clipping. It's actually a full adder. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So I was proud of that. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Even though the underlying rules are simple, there's an emergent complexity. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I once got in trouble with one of my professors because I had overspent the department's budget. It's a different story.

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