The People Who Are Shaping Our Lives
Published: 6/2/2026
Written by: Adron Harris
We see a lot these days about the promises and perils of new technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI). The pope even warned us against it recently. With the possible exception of Elon Musk and a couple other villains, we don’t hear much about the fascinating individuals who are creating these innovations. Biographies are an approachable and even entertaining window onto new technologies, and the Mendocino Community Library has a nice collection of them. Many of the people are actually pleasant to read about.
In “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip,” by Stephen Witt, we see how a kid from Taiwan came to a high school for last-chance kids in Kentucky (his parents mistakenly thought it was a college prep school) and eventually started a gaming device company. As the company was struggling a bit, one of few employees who was not an engineer convinced Huang that AI might someday amount to something. Now the company develops graphics processing units (GPUs), systems on chips (SoCs), and application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and the high-performance computing used in AI. Huang’s exceptional focus, vision, and determination created one of the most influential companies on the planet.
“The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deepmind, and the Quest for Superintelligence,” by Sebastian Mallaby, tells of an extraordinary innovator who is responsible for much of the progress in AI. His mother was an orphan living on the streets of Singapore who somehow made it to England and his father was a Greek immigrant. While in university he also worked for a gaming company, but always had the goal of replicating human intelligence in computers. He decided the he needed to go to graduate school in neuroscience to accomplish this. the owner of the company offered him $500,000 to NOT go to graduate school. Hassabis refused, but managed to convince the owner to loan him his Porsche for several years to speed up his commute to Cambridge. For his PhD, he studied the basis of imagination in the brain because he wanted to create machines with creativity (he succeeded). He founded and developed the extraordinarily successful company, DeepMind, and he and his team coaxed creativity and insight from silicon chips. He partnered with Google, which wanted him to move to Silicon Valley, but Hassabis would not budge from his beloved England.
These two books demonstrate clearly the pros and cons of AI. In a recent book titled “The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future,” by Virginia Dignum, she explores the ethical issues of AI, what is hype, what might actually happen, and how we can prepare for a world awash in AI. Artificial intelligence will shape our future in unforeseen ways, and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it could someday dictate the terms of our very existence. However, the more that AI can do, the more it underscores the irreplaceable qualities of human creativity, empathy, and moral reasoning.
The field of AI is not the only area that raises moral questions; genetic engineering is equally concerning. In “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race,” Walter Isaacson explains how Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies. She and her collaborators invented an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
Doudna’s trail to her Nobel Prize was blazed by Marie Curie, whose discoveries also opened up one or two Pandora’s boxes. Dava Sobel’s “The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science” reveals the bias that prohibited Curie from joining the French Academy of Sciences, that is, until the Royal Swedish Academy of Science awarded her two Nobel Prizes for her work in radioactivity. Furthermore, many young women who trained in her laboratory were launched on stellar scientific careers of their own. That’s the good news; the bad news is that Curie died in 1934, when she was 66, of aplastic anemia, likely from exposure to radiation in her research.
We also have fascinating and insightful biographies of earlier innovators like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. I particularly enjoyed “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,” also by Walter Isaacson, which demonstrates that Franklin should be thought of as an important figure in the history of science as well as American statesmanship. His experimental accomplishments far exceeded sticking a key on a kite string in a rainstorm. Discoveries aplenty await readers who want to explore any of these excellent biographies.
The library is open on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 10:00 am until 2:00 pm. Visit our web page (https://www.mendocinocommunitylibrary.org/) to learn about becoming a member or to find any item in our collection.
Written by: Adron Harris
We see a lot these days about the promises and perils of new technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI). The pope even warned us against it recently. With the possible exception of Elon Musk and a couple other villains, we don’t hear much about the fascinating individuals who are creating these innovations. Biographies are an approachable and even entertaining window onto new technologies, and the Mendocino Community Library has a nice collection of them. Many of the people are actually pleasant to read about.
In “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip,” by Stephen Witt, we see how a kid from Taiwan came to a high school for last-chance kids in Kentucky (his parents mistakenly thought it was a college prep school) and eventually started a gaming device company. As the company was struggling a bit, one of few employees who was not an engineer convinced Huang that AI might someday amount to something. Now the company develops graphics processing units (GPUs), systems on chips (SoCs), and application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and the high-performance computing used in AI. Huang’s exceptional focus, vision, and determination created one of the most influential companies on the planet.
“The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deepmind, and the Quest for Superintelligence,” by Sebastian Mallaby, tells of an extraordinary innovator who is responsible for much of the progress in AI. His mother was an orphan living on the streets of Singapore who somehow made it to England and his father was a Greek immigrant. While in university he also worked for a gaming company, but always had the goal of replicating human intelligence in computers. He decided the he needed to go to graduate school in neuroscience to accomplish this. the owner of the company offered him $500,000 to NOT go to graduate school. Hassabis refused, but managed to convince the owner to loan him his Porsche for several years to speed up his commute to Cambridge. For his PhD, he studied the basis of imagination in the brain because he wanted to create machines with creativity (he succeeded). He founded and developed the extraordinarily successful company, DeepMind, and he and his team coaxed creativity and insight from silicon chips. He partnered with Google, which wanted him to move to Silicon Valley, but Hassabis would not budge from his beloved England.
These two books demonstrate clearly the pros and cons of AI. In a recent book titled “The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future,” by Virginia Dignum, she explores the ethical issues of AI, what is hype, what might actually happen, and how we can prepare for a world awash in AI. Artificial intelligence will shape our future in unforeseen ways, and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it could someday dictate the terms of our very existence. However, the more that AI can do, the more it underscores the irreplaceable qualities of human creativity, empathy, and moral reasoning.
The field of AI is not the only area that raises moral questions; genetic engineering is equally concerning. In “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race,” Walter Isaacson explains how Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies. She and her collaborators invented an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
Doudna’s trail to her Nobel Prize was blazed by Marie Curie, whose discoveries also opened up one or two Pandora’s boxes. Dava Sobel’s “The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science” reveals the bias that prohibited Curie from joining the French Academy of Sciences, that is, until the Royal Swedish Academy of Science awarded her two Nobel Prizes for her work in radioactivity. Furthermore, many young women who trained in her laboratory were launched on stellar scientific careers of their own. That’s the good news; the bad news is that Curie died in 1934, when she was 66, of aplastic anemia, likely from exposure to radiation in her research.
We also have fascinating and insightful biographies of earlier innovators like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. I particularly enjoyed “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,” also by Walter Isaacson, which demonstrates that Franklin should be thought of as an important figure in the history of science as well as American statesmanship. His experimental accomplishments far exceeded sticking a key on a kite string in a rainstorm. Discoveries aplenty await readers who want to explore any of these excellent biographies.
The library is open on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 10:00 am until 2:00 pm. Visit our web page (https://www.mendocinocommunitylibrary.org/) to learn about becoming a member or to find any item in our collection.