Our Collective Voice

On July 4th, I took a long, four-and-one-half-hour, thoughtful walk. I am fortunate to live in a coastal community that celebrates July 4th simply and authentically. Farmer John drives his tractor down the main street. His father-in-law, a veteran of World War II, was interviewed in front of city hall, next to the famous Half Moon Bay "Sit Down the marching band." Some are older, and this year, the band seemed smaller.

In my walk, I absorbed the diversity of our community. Once a fishing village, Half Moon Bay was formed in 1840 as San Benito, an outpost of Mission San Francisco. The San Benito house is still a center of local color—a bar with swinging doors, music, and a lovely outside garden.

Most of our modern global technological infrastructure was created within a 50-mile radius of this town. I came here 42 years ago to join some professors at Stanford in an AI startup that would go public a couple of years later under the stock symbol INAI. I had the opportunity to meet and spend time with pioneers like Gordon Moore, who founded Moore's Law. Five years earlier, I had written a natural language parser that ran on the Intel 8080 - just because you could. I reflected on those years as I walked the main street, absorbing the joy and delight of an old-fashioned Fourth of July.