The following is a conversation with Guido and Rasm, creator of Python, one of the most popular programming languages in the world,

used in almost any application that involves computers, from web, backend development to psychology, neuroscience, computer vision, robotics, deep learning, natural language processing, and almost any subfield of AI.

This conversation is part of MIT course on artificial general intelligence and the artificial intelligence podcast.

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And now, here's my conversation with Guido and Rasm.

You were born in the Netherlands in 1956. Your parents in the world around you was deeply impacted by World War II, as was my family from the Soviet Union.

So with that context, what is your view of human nature? Are some humans inherently good and some inherently evil, or do we all have both good and evil within us?

Ouch, I did not expect such a deep one. I guess we all have good and evil potential in us, and a lot of it depends on circumstances and context.

Out of that world, at least on the Soviet Union side in Europe, sort of out of suffering, out of challenge, out of that kind of set of traumatic events, often emerges beautiful art, music, literature.

In an interview I read or heard, you said you enjoy Dutch literature when you were a child. Can you tell me about the books that had an influence on you and your childhood?

Well, as a teenager, my favorite writer was, my favorite Dutch author was a guy named Vilum Friedrich Hermanns, whose writing, certainly his early novels, were all about sort of ambiguous things that happened during World War II.

I think he was a young adult during that time, and he wrote about it a lot, and very interesting, very good books I thought, I think.

In a nonfiction way.

No, it was all fiction, but it was very much set in the ambiguous world of resistance against the Germans,

where often you couldn't tell whether someone was truly in the resistance or really a spy for the Germans, and some of the characters in his novels sort of crossed that line, and you never really find out what exactly happened.

And in his novels, there's always a good guy, and a bad guy, in the nature of good and evil, is it clear there's a hero?

It's no, his heroes are often more, his main characters are often anti-heroes, and so they're not very heroic.

They're often, they fail at some level to accomplish their lofty goals.

And looking at the trajectory through the rest of your life, has literature, Dutch, or English, or translation, and an impact,

outside the technical world that you existed in?

I still read novels. I don't think that it impacts me that much directly.

It doesn't impact your work. It's just, it's a...

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