IEEE Spectrum's October 2021 special issue on artificial intelligence featured provocative quotes from its past Q&As and articles with top AI thinkers. Jeff Hawkins, cofounder and chief scientist of Numenta, said, "General intelligence doesn't mean you have to understand humans. There will be a lot of intelligent machines that don't need to know that stuff. [Take the] example of robotic construction workers on Mars: I don't think they need to understand human emotions and human desires to be able to construct things." Michael Jordan, professor at University of California, Berkeley, stated, "While the science-fiction discussions about AI and superintelligence are fun, they are a distraction. There's not been enough focus on the real problem, which is building planetary-scale machine learning–based systems that actually work, deliver value to humans, and do not amplify inequities." Yann LeCun, professor at New York University and chief AI scientist at Facebook, remarked, "What's missing is a principle that would allow our machine to learn how the world works by observation and by interaction with the world. A learning predictive world model is what we're missing today, and in my opinion is the biggest obstacle to significant progress in AI." The quotes were drawn from articles including "Deep Learning Isn't Deep Enough Unless It Copies From the Brain" (March 2021), "Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine Learning Pioneer Says" (March 2021), and "Will the Future of AI Learning