Grace Hopper
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Grace Hopper. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Grace Hopper's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
She carried a piece of wire in her purse for twenty years.
Eleven and eight-tenths inches long. The distance light travels in one billionth of a second. She held it up in front of admirals, senators, graduate students, corporate executives — anyone who would listen — and she made an invisible thing physical. She made a nanosecond something you could hold in your hand.
That is the thing about Grace Hopper that matters right now, in this moment, for this book. Not the biography. Not the rank. Not even the compiler, though the compiler changed everything. What matters is the method. She had an almost supernatural ability to take a concept that lived entirely inside the abstractions of computing and make it land in the body
