Walter Isaacson Quote
A simple, inspiring mission for Wikipedia: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing. It was a huge, audacious, and worthy goal. But it badly understated what Wikipedia did. It was about more than people being given free access to knowledge; it was also about empowering them, in a way not seen before in history, to be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Wales came to realize that. Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their own, he said. When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.111 Wikipedia took the world another step closer to the vision propounded by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay, As We May Think, which predicted, Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. It also harkened back to Ada Lovelace, who asserted that machines would be able to do almost anything, except think on their own. Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could think on its own. It was instead a dazzling example of human-machine symbiosis, the wisdom of humans and the processing power of computers being woven together like a tapestry.
A simple, inspiring mission for Wikipedia: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing. It was a huge, audacious, and worthy goal. But it badly understated what Wikipedia did. It was about more than people being given free access to knowledge; it was also about empowering them, in a way not seen before in history, to be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Wales came to realize that. Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their own, he said. When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.111 Wikipedia took the world another step closer to the vision propounded by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay, As We May Think, which predicted, Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. It also harkened back to Ada Lovelace, who asserted that machines would be able to do almost anything, except think on their own. Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could think on its own. It was instead a dazzling example of human-machine symbiosis, the wisdom of humans and the processing power of computers being woven together like a tapestry.
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About Walter Isaacson
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.