'The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn' by Richard Hamming
While I am only about a quarter of the way through this book, I would highly recommend it for anyone who is on the more technically-minded side. Hamming has so many nuggets of wisdom that are worth thoughtful consideration.
On having a vision:
"In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance . In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen."
On the definition of "thinking" and how it might be different from what computers do:
"Finally, perhaps thinking should be measured not by what you do but how you do it. When I watch a child learning how to multiply two, say, three-digit numbers, then I have the feeling the child is thinking; when I do the same multiplication I feel I am more doing “conditioned responses”; when a computer does the same multiplication I do not feel the machine is thinking at all. In the words of the old song, “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” In the area of thinking, maybe we have confused what is done with the way it is done, and this may be the source of much of our confusion in AI."
The book is based on lectures he gave in 1995 and his predictions for what the world would look like from a technological perspective turned out to be spot-on.
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