Two world wars and a Great Depression rocked the confidence of many people that scientific expertise alone could create a prosperous and ordered world.
"People you tell are going to cautiously and not so cautiously try to see the cancer, so dazzle them instead with your miracle," she writes in the book.
The words that have mattered are efficiency, flexibility, shareholder value, business-friendly, wealth generation, sales, impact and, in newspapers, circulation.
Professor Goel decided to do something to remedy this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson, which is based on the IBM Watson platform.
One of these urges had to do with creating a state of peace in the midst of turbulence, a "still point of the turning world," to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot.