“My mother was a philosophy professor in Oxford, and when I was a kid, I would always say, if there's one thing I'll never do when I'm grown up, it's philosophy, because how can one be serious about a field where people are still arguing about the same things that they were arguing about 2,000 years ago, and there's no kind of apparent progress. But actually, the exciting thing has been that both in my kind of work in building computational language, and in my work in understanding the computational foundations of physics, that it turns out that a bunch of those things that people have been arguing about for a couple of thousand years, we can actually say some real things about. It’s a funny thing because I've spent my life sort of building this big tower of science and technology and, every so often, something comes out of that tower that people say, "This is a cool thing, we're really going to be excited about this particular thing." For me, the whole tower is the thing that's really important. And in the future, that's what the tower that I've tried to build is certainly the most significant thing I've been able to do. And it's something that, you know, I've been able to see now over the course of half a century or so, kind of how various ideas I've had and directions I've gone have actually played out.”