I enjoyed more than I expected Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s book The Worlds I See, a chronicle of one scientist’s research into the emergent field of artificial intelligence. The most moving sections for me were Dr. Fei-fei’s personal story as a young Chinese immigrant, trying to navigate through American society with her family. There was a lot that felt so true and hit home to me.
But it was this paragraph that really broke me, where her health-compromised mother tells her why she shouldn’t give up her dream to be an AI scientist:
This has never been your journey. From the very beginning, this has been our journey. Whether you were fated to be a scientist, a researcher, or something else I can’t even imagine, and whether or not you’ll ever make more than a pittance doing it, we’ve been working toward it as a family since the moment our plane left that runway in Shanghai.