One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
To be beyond any existing classification has always pleased me.
How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white?
I was part of the draft resistance movement in L.A. where we did demonstrations at the draft centre and burned our cards and made a lot of trouble on campus. I had a student classification and they said that anybody who'd taken part in these demonstrations would be reclassified and drafted. And that's when I went to Canada.
Where protection of certain sensitive information is well-founded, I remain committed to upholding the laws and longstanding policies governing classification and public release.
I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends.
In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.
We cannot expect to keep our nation's secrets secure - or provide meaningful oversight for our intelligence agencies - if proper classification of our country's secrets is as likely as a coin flip.
Take any old classification problem where you have a lot of data, and it's going to be solved by deep learning. There's going to be thousands of applications of deep learning.
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
