I mean that both the ways people interpret Shakespeare’s meaning when he has Antonio utter the phrase in The Tempest.

In one interpretation it is that the past has predetermined the sequence which is about to unfold–and so I believe that how we have gotten to where we are in Artificial Intelligence will determine the directions we take next–so it is worth studying that past.

Another interpretation is that really the past was not much and the majority of necessary work lies ahead–that too, I believe. We have hardly even gotten started on Artificial Intelligence and there is lots of hard work ahead.