From the book: "To understand the crucial role played by Chomsky in all this, let me take you back to his very first job interview in 1955. It was for a post in a military lab in Boston, the Cold War by this stage well under way. The successful applicant would join a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on machine translation, a project heavily funded by the Pentagon with military applications in mind. 2 Noam Chomsky attended the inter￾view but had other ideas. Detesting the whole concept of military research, he explained that he wasn’t interested in machine translation and wouldn’t help. On that understanding, he was given the job. From then on, according to Chomsky, he never touched machine translation at all."