Black quotes

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David_Auerbach

Synchronizing Interpretability

“The more tenable problem may be one of synchronizing interpretability between machine networks and humans, so that even though we each are black boxes, humans can still tune and correct machines — and vice versa.”
  • Source: David Auerbach, in the article “Bitwise: A Life in Code” published in 2019 in Communications of the ACM, Volume 62, Issue 9 (September). DOI: 10.1145/3347864.

Henry_Ford

Any Color

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
  • Source: Henry Ford. A book. Entitled My Life and Work. Written by Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crowther. Published 1922, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Chapter IV.

Byron_K_Jennings

Crows

“While seeing any number of black crows does not prove all the crows are black, seeing one white crow disproves it. Thus science proceeds not by proving models correct but by discarding false ones or improving incomplete ones.”
  • Source: Byron K. Jennings, In 'On the Nature of Science', Physics in Canada (Jan/Feb 2007), 63, No. 1, 7.

Patrick_Vlaskovits

Faster Horse

“However, even if Ford didn’t verbalize his thoughts on customers’ ostensible inability to communicate their unmet needs for innovative products — history indicates that Henry Ford most certainly did think along those lines... Henry Ford froze the design of the Model T... Ford had no compelling reason to innovate in any other sphere other than cost and price reduction... But everything changed with the onset of the innovations introduced by General Motors in the 1920s, which took the direct opposite of Henry Ford’s tack of “Any color … so long as it is black” and is best summed up by Alfred Sloan’s consumer-research driven “A Car for Every Purse and Purpose”... In 1921, the Ford Motor Company sold about 2/3 of all the cars built in the U.S. By 1926, this share had fallen to approximately 1/3. And in 1927, when Ford belatedly responded (at tremendous financial cost and internal strife) to changes in the market’s tastes and competitive innovation by shutting down production temporarily to re-tool his factories and bring the Model A to the market, that percentage fell to about 15%... Yes, some customers in certain types of businesses are quite capable of verbalizing precisely what sort of innovative product one could build and sell them. And of course, customers in other types of businesses are wholly incapable of verbalizing, with any sort of fidelity whatsoever, what they need and why they need it. An innovator should have understanding of one’s customers and their problems via empirical, observational, anecdotal methods or even intuition. They should also feel free to ignore customers’ inputs. Because by now it should be clear that Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-market car and how to materialize that vision was instrumental in both his early success in growing Ford Motor Company as well as his later failure to respond in a timely and effective manner to rapid innovation in the marketplace.”'