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Even so, my memories of a visit to the National Air and Space Museum still sparkled. Its life-sized exhibits demonstrated the scale and gallantry of aerospace history, overwhelming my senses and igniting my imagination. I was reminded that even as a teenage girl living well beyond the margins of society, the world I wanted to inhabit most of all was that of science.
My being the only child and sole financial support of two parents—not to mention the translator between our caretakers’ English and their native Mandarin—there was no escaping the feeling that it was wrong to even consider a trip like this.
The founding ideals of this country, however imperfectly they’ve been practiced in the centuries since, seemed as wise a foundation as any on which to build the future of technology: the dignity of the individual, the intrinsic value of representation, and the belief that human endeavors are best when guided by the many, rather than the few.
As is so often the case with prejudice, her defeat was the slow, unspoken kind. There was no threat of violence or imprisonment, no conspiracy or scandal, just a status quo that revealed its presence through the passive-aggressive remarks of teachers and administrators, politely but firmly discouraging her, even at her academic peak, from applying to the best schools.
became. So although I was familiar with the works of Lu Xun or Taoist scriptures like the Tao Te Ching, I devoured the Chinese translations of Western classics like Le Deuxième Sexe, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Count of Monte Cristo.
As their friends hosted fawning dinner parties for their bosses, purchased them gifts in the hopes of earning favor, and talked endlessly about status in one form or another, my parents sat proudly on the sidelines.
In a community obsessed with inculcating respect in its children—success measured less in terms of grades per se than a reputation for following rules, listening closely, and earning the praise of teachers—my parents were unconcerned, even irreverent.
By any measure, we appeared to be exceedingly typical members of China’s emerging middle class, not yet swept up in the whirlwind of consumerism to come but largely spared the privation of previous generations.
Like my mother, they bought me books in abundance, exploring topics as wide-ranging as marine life, robotics, and Chinese mythology.
As boys, you’re biologically smarter than girls. Math and science are fundamental parts of that, and there’s just no excuse for your average exam scores to be lower than theirs.
As you become teenagers, you’ll find the girls among you naturally grow stupider. Their potential will fade and their scores will drop.
Then, as another moment passed, the questions were shoved aside by a new feeling. It was heavy and jagged, and clawed its way up from a part of me I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t feel discouraged, or even offended. I was angry. It was an anger I wasn’t familiar with—a quiet heat, an indignation like I’d seen in my mother, but unmistakably my own.
Most indications were subtle, if not intangible, like the sneaking suspicion that teachers doled out encouragement more readily to boys when it came to math and science.
I cut my hair as short as I could, refused to wear dresses, and flung myself into interests that I knew defied expectations, especially the science of aerospace, the design of hypersonic aircraft, and even paranormal topics like UFOs.
When the day arrived, my hair was no longer my only trademark; I was also the only student in a sea of white shirts to sport rainbow-colored buttons.
It’s never too early to start preparing for final exams, for example, so I often ask each student to share the books they’re reading with the class. Most cite textbooks, prep manuals, and selections from the school’s approved reading list.
And uh, she certainly listed more books than anyone in the class—”
“It’s what she’s reading. I mean, The Unbearable Lightness of Being? The Brontë sisters? And all these magazines she subscribes to. Marine life, fighter jets, something about UFOs … the list goes on. She’s just not prioritizing literature that reflects the values and ideas of the curriculum.”
That’s why intellect is only one ingredient in success. Another is the discipline to put aside one’s personal interests in favor of the studies that will prove most useful in the years ahead.”
Everything changed in 1989.
Overtones of patriotism were woven throughout each of the day’s lessons, and not just in literature, history, and civics classes, but even in math and science.
“Education” … “Opportunity” … “Freedom” … “A better life for her” … and, most frequently, my name.
To make matters worse, the supposed second phase of the plan—the one in which my mother and I would join my father in America—was continually delayed by the bureaucratic hurdles imposed by both countries’ migration procedures.
The worst part—even worse than my performance in the class—was having no answer. Another summer was approaching, and while I’d have normally winced at the thought of shying away from a challenge, especially with so much on the line, a year of failure coupled with a faltering support system at home had demoralized me. It was the lowest I’d ever felt, and it made the choice between respite or months of obsessive self-study easy. I chose respite.
But even as this new skill seemed to pour out of me, I was humbled—thrilled, really—by how much more there was to learn.
But at other times, the scope of what I stood to lose—my friends, my grandparents, everything I knew—would hit me in a single blow.
Einstein was an immigrant, too, after all.
It was an instantly destabilizing sight, and I wished I could shut my eyes and erase it. Tucked beneath her coat, concealed, but imperfectly so, her hands were trembling.
I had grandparents I loved dearly, though our departure meant losing them, at least for now.
While China endured a painful, century-long transformation of its culture and economy, America was the site of a different kind of revolution: a digital one. As my grandparents were swept up in the chaos of wartime displacement and my mother and father absorbed the shocks of the Cultural Revolution, a loose community of scientists and engineers in the U.S. and U.K.—from Cambridge to Boston to Northern California—were already decades into a scientific quest that would one day rank among the most profound in the history of our species.
At a time when state-of-the-art technology required entire rooms of hardware to perform arithmetic, pioneering scientists like Alan Turing, the English code breaker famous for helping end the Second World War, were already seeing parallels between machines and the brain.
Turing’s vision was shared by his fellow computer scientists in America, who codified their curiosity in 1956 with a now famous Dartmouth College research proposal in which the term “artificial intelligence” was coined.
The project was helmed largely by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, mathematicians with long-standing curiosity about the brain, along with Nathaniel Rochester, designer of the IBM 701 computer, and Claude Shannon, progenitor of the field of information theory.
That connection to physics, in fact, was more than a thematic one; although many of AI’s founding contributors would go on to explore an eclectic range of fields, including psychology and cognitive science, their backgrounds were almost exclusively centered on mathematics, electrical engineering, and physics itself.
Feigenbaum’s innovation was the dawn of a subfield that came to be known as “knowledge engineering,” in which facts about a particular domain—medicine, pharmaceuticals, finance, or just about anything else—were organized into libraries of machine-readable data that could be analyzed just like Winograd’s geometric shapes, in the form of naturally written questions and answers that automated the experience of consulting with a human expert. These programs, dubbed “expert systems,” were the strongest evidence in years that AI could perform useful tasks in the real world, and showed that it could
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Despite a wave of initial excitement, expert system development was frequently bogged down by the logistical hurdles of simply organizing such enormous volumes of information in the first place.
The mind goes to dark places when a loved one is missing for too long, and our thoughts were made all the more harrowing by our circumstances: my mother had exactly twenty U.S. dollars in her pocket, we had no return ticket, and I quickly found that the couple of years I’d spent learning basic English in school were all but useless in practice.
Our destination was a New Jersey township called Parsippany, chosen by my father for its sizable immigrant community and proximity to nearby highways.
Small businesses boasted vast parking lots, with space after space unused.
On an otherwise imposing first day, I instantly knew one thing: I would love American teachers.
My father crossed paths with a Taiwanese business owner not long after his arrival and parlayed his knack for engineering into a job repairing cameras in a shop the man owned.
Yann LeCun would one day serve as Facebook’s chief scientist of AI, but his career in research was only dawning at Holmdel, New Jersey’s Bell Labs when my family arrived in America.
It also prefigured a bold future: after generations of rigid algorithms that attempted to exhaustively describe intelligence in terms of rules, often referred to as “symbolic AI,” the end
of the 1980s and the early 1990s saw the tide beginning to turn in favor of this more natural approach. Increased attention was being paid to algorithms that solved problems by discovering patterns from examples, rather than being explicitly programmed—in other words, learning what to do rather than being told. Researchers gave it a fitting name: “machine learning.”
One such moment came in 1958, when a psychology researcher at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory named Frank Rosenblatt developed a mechanical neuron he called the “perceptron.”
There were certain indignities I simply refused to accept. If money was the only way to loosen up our strictures, I resolved to earn some myself.
It was an off-the-books position, free from the prying eyes of labor laws and New Jersey’s minimum wage, and the terms reflected it: two dollars an hour for twelve hours a day when school wasn’t in session, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. The surrounding neighborhood—sketchy, the locals warned me—felt intimidating by the time darkness fell.
And while the pay was consistently low, I had no employment history to compare it to, and it was amazing how much difference even a pittance made in our lives.
As demoralizing as our circumstances could be, however, the lack of encouragement within our community was often worse. This was especially apparent at work, where the pressure to keep our heads above water conditioned us to view any deviation from the norm with an abrasive skepticism.
Looking back, I don’t believe it was his intent to condescend—he was a fellow immigrant himself—but it was another discouraging reminder that the imaginations of people like us were superfluous in our new lives.
