Thinkers Timeline

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian media theorist. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and studied literature at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University in England. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Toronto, where he became one of the most famous and controversial public intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. He is best known for two phrases that have become part of everyday language: the medium is the message and the global village. His books Understanding Media (1964) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) argued that the dominant communication technology of any period, whether oral storytelling, writing, print, or electronic media, shapes how people think, what they can think, and how they organise their social lives far more profoundly than the content of any particular message. He was dismissed by many academic critics as too speculative and too interested in provocation, but he was also widely celebrated by artists, media professionals, and a general public who found his ideas illuminating. He had a stroke in 1979 that left him unable to speak and died in 1980. His ideas have gained new relevance in the age of the internet and social media.

Taiichi Ohno (1912-1990) was a Japanese industrial engineer whose work at the Toyota Motor Company produced the Toyota Production System, a way of organising manufacturing that has since spread worldwide under names including lean manufacturing and just-in-time production. He was born in 1912 in Dalian, then in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, where his father worked. He graduated from what is now Nagoya Technical High School in 1932 and joined Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, a textile machinery company run by the Toyoda family. In 1943 he moved to Toyota Motor Company, the automobile manufacturer that the same family had founded. He would remain there for the rest of his career. He started as a shop-floor supervisor and rose through operational roles, eventually becoming executive vice president in 1975. His rise came through his practical work on the production line, not through the management hierarchy. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s, he developed the production methods that would make Toyota one of the most efficient and quality-focused manufacturers in the world. The methods were not written down in any comprehensive way for decades; they were transmitted through the practice of production workers and engineers trained by Ohno himself. Workshops and demonstrations — not textbooks — were his teaching methods. His short book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, published in Japanese in 1978 and in English in 1988, remains the most direct source for his ideas. Western interest in his work exploded in the 1980s when American manufacturers began realising that they had been outcompeted by Japanese firms using methods they did not understand. He retired from Toyota in 1978 and died in Toyota City in 1990.

Fazlur Rahman Khan (1929-1982) was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer whose innovations transformed how tall buildings are designed and made the modern generation of skyscrapers possible. He was born in Dhaka, then part of British India and later the capital of Bangladesh, to a family of educators. His father was a mathematics teacher who later became director of public instruction for East Bengal. Khan studied civil engineering at the Bengal Engineering College in Calcutta and at Dhaka University. In 1952 he travelled to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, earning two master's degrees and a doctorate at the University of Illinois by 1955. He joined the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, where he spent his entire career and became a partner in 1966. Working closely with architects including Bruce Graham, he designed two of the most important skyscrapers of the twentieth century: the John Hancock Center, completed in 1969, and the Sears Tower, completed in 1973 and the world's tallest building for twenty-five years. He also designed Hajj Terminal at Jeddah airport, one of the largest fabric roof structures in the world. He died of a heart attack in Saudi Arabia in 1982, at only fifty-three. His tubular design systems and his broader philosophy of structural efficiency have become the foundation on which nearly every tall building built since has been constructed.

Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-American computer scientist. She is one of the most important researchers in the field of AI ethics. Her work has shown how artificial intelligence systems can encode and amplify racial bias, gender bias, and other forms of harm. She was born in 1982 or 1983 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She came to the United States as a teenage refugee. Her family fled Ethiopia after political violence affected her brothers. She arrived in the US in 2001 and faced typical refugee challenges. She did her undergraduate work at Stanford University in electrical engineering. She earned a PhD at the Stanford AI Lab in 2017, studying under the leading computer vision researcher Fei-Fei Li. Her doctoral work used Google Street View images to predict demographic and political patterns from cars in different neighbourhoods. The research drew attention. After her PhD, she did postdoctoral work at Microsoft Research, then joined Google in 2018. She co-led Google's Ethical AI team alongside Margaret Mitchell. In 2020, Gebru and her colleagues drafted a research paper about the risks of large language models, then a new technology. The paper, often called the Stochastic Parrots paper, argued that very large AI language systems carried serious risks. Google ordered her to retract the paper or remove her name. She refused. Google fired her, though Google described the departure differently. The firing caused a major public controversy. Many researchers signed petitions in her support. Several Google researchers later resigned in protest. In 2021 she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent research lab focused on AI ethics. She has continued speaking publicly about harms in AI systems. She has become one of the most visible critics of how the technology industry develops AI.