Runaway Recommendation Engine

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2021

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:04.2	There's a person who I'm pretty sure helped make the modern internet so addictive.
0:13.2	But it was kind of an accident and I'm not even sure he knows it yet.
0:17.4	His name is Doug Terry.
0:19.7	And a distinguished scientist at Amazon?
0:22.8	Oh wow, a distinguished scientist.
0:24.7	To recall you distinguished Doug?
0:26.8	It's actually distinguished doctor Doug is what people call me.
0:31.5	Distinguished doctor Doug is an engineer and inventor.
0:34.8	What's the thing that you're proudest of that you've invented ever?
0:37.6	The thing that I'm...
0:38.6	Unless it's a state secret.
0:41.0	Well, there's this thing called the domain name system.
0:46.0	All these little names that you type in these days with dots on it.
0:50.2	You know Amazon.com.
0:51.2	You did that?
0:52.2	That was my PhD dissertation was designing that.
0:57.7	In 1990, Doug was a researcher at this utopia called Xerox Park.
1:02.5	This Disneyland of computer inventions that would give the world such hits as the personal
1:07.4	computer, Ethernet, laser jet printing.
1:11.2	Doug says their inventions were often just solutions to things that annoyed them.
1:16.6	Right, which for Doug was his email.
	...

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