The AI Organization

AI Hero: Tanya

“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” We’ve probably all heard that quote, but only a few know its origin. Tanya is one of them, and I learned it from her. The quote belongs to Grace Hopper, a US Naval officer who is considered a pioneer of computer programming. She created the first compiler for a programming language, which evolved into the incredibly popular COBOL, which is still behind many of the largest applications in the world (like core banking systems).

Hopper’s idea was simple: instead of humans needing to learn the language of computers to program them, why don’t computers learn ours? Hopper’s compiler was designed to translate English-based language with instructions like IF, SET, STOP, or JUMP to a set of machine instructions that a computer would understand.

If there was one thing that Rear Admiral Hopper hated the most, it was hearing a sentence popular in every organization on the planet: “We’ve always done it this way.” When sharing her idea with others, she heard that expressed in many forms. “Computers could only do arithmetic, they could not do programs,” she was told.

There are some people in this world who get more motivated to do something when they are told their idea can’t be implemented. These people see something that is broken, and they fix it—no permission required. Grace Hopper was one of them. Tanya, a professor at the University of Illinois and the cofounder of the AI nonprofit Wild Me, is definitely another. ...