but I am sure that it is close enough to reality to help us make sense of the idea that the consequences for intellec- tual development of one innovation could be qualitatively greater than the cumulative quantitative effects of a thousand others.

And we can, right now, today, prepare powerful ways of thinking for these people. We can build the tools that make it possible to think that thing. We cannot see the thing. At all. My job is to make sure our children can.

Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer was a mechanical masterpiece which no longer matters.

We want direct, interactive control of each parameter, so we can go forward and backward, stop, and jump to arbitrary positions. This allows us to travel freely around the territory, investigate areas of interest, and pose and verify hypotheses as quickly we think of them.

Designing a system requires designing a model for the input data. This can be as much art, and as much challenge, as designing the structure itself. Sometimes we can use real-life data — a stock market predictor has plenty of historical data to scoop up. But if we want to understand how the data influences the behavior, we need to be able to control it. We need dimensions, like our road's bend angle, where we can try "more of this" and "less of that". Sometimes we can get these dimensions by organizing real-life data in some way. Sometimes it's easier to synthesize our data, so we can control its characteristics precisely.

alue changes lend themselves more readily to interactive control and abstraction. But structural changes usually have more impact, and it's important to consider how they can be explored and abstracted over.

The structure is the set of rules that the system obeys.

Real-world systems may be more complex, but they all share the same general anatomy: an independent variable (such as time), a structure (such as an algorithm), and a dataset (such as an environment).

But we must never lose touch with what the behavior looks like on the ground, and everywhere in between.

To design quickly and confidently, we need to be able to try out ideas and verify hypotheses as fast as we think of them.

Brook Lopez this season had more blocks than Kevin Garnett had in his best season and more 3 pointers than Kobe Bryant had in his best season...