[S'posed to be under your little synopsis, Gerard - failure of actual-intelligence there; imagine where AI might have put it?]

Gotta *love* his, emotion is just another way of thinking mantra. (Oh wait! mantra.. er, what could a machine do with a mantra ??)

Not to mention the peculiar idea of love, perhaps merely a synergistic metamorphosis of simultaneous integration and disintegration of a neural network .. er in extremis (whaaat.. machine language is Not Latin-conversant? Too?)

{sigh} Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep\ufffd ??? (Thanks Philip K. Dick - a one far advanced from poor Mr. Minsky's dreadful mindset? neuron race-condition?) Dark Star for umm, existential logical encore (?)

Well, I guess it'd be pretty hard to get the attention (let alone any idea of Attention!) of a homo-sap who hasn't read Pygmalion and couldn't even 'get' My Fair Lady, with or without Audrey Hepburn...

So I'd cut to the chase with such as he.
Basic Principle pre-101A ie BA (before academia):

A machine could not ever realize anything!
A machine might pseudoize .. something.. odd.

This combined with another BP, the lower cannot see the higher; pretty much explains why, for example:

The mind cannot 'see itself' (no, Marv, bunky, not even Your er 'mind' tryin to take a gander at some Other homo-sap's er 'mind').

It's easy to see that ol' Marv found a neat way to escape all those basket-weaving umm humanities courses, prolly imagines that 'meta-' is just about certain states of the 2s, 2p electrons, and that 'metaphysics' is just about, oh maybe: n-dimensional phase space and other contrivances of 'mind'?
Surely all superstition, when ya got Real electrons to work with..

I've no doubt he'll be able to fold his 'love of his work' into the first synthesized I Love Me doll which shall {alas} promptly eat itself, with 'relish'. (No, the doll will Not get 'relish' even literally, nor can nuance reach farther than dev/null in its accumulator CMOS. I 'feel' that, anyway...)

And so it goes.

Ahhh.... to have the sinecure of a Tenured Prof at MIT, free to range (forage?) the world with the New Eugenics -- even if, as you hint: severe peristalsis failures have caused him to confuse the effects of massively backed-up fecal material and.. the other idea.. fecund. (Oh well - he prolly skipped English too, poor dear)

(Personally I like the similarities of 'AD' (M$ version of a brain-dead something) and Artificial Dumbth. Hmmm, bet a panel with Gore Vidal and HL Mencken could create a rather nice musical ... from Mr. Minsky's phantom quest? Toss in George Carlin as moderator?)

Y'know.. he could hurt himself w/o a valet -


Ashton Barbarossa
(What it said, over 'my' student-house doorway at the institute was, "Know thyself". 'Course my institute was on the opposite coast.. the water is different there, perhaps. Not so much ivy growing on the cell walls?)

I've been around such folk for lengthy periods, too. Really handy to take certain problems to - with caution. In '64 (that's when we got the first PDP-8s IIRC) it's understandable that one would try to fly before crawling was a done deal.

What I can never quite get though, is how considerably ept techno- folk can sail off into 'AI' with such assurances (as we've been hearing regularly since about that time) before noticing what is known? suspected about: that which they believe they are about to emulate (!) as,

[link|http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/bk8/bk8ch2.htm|How Brains Think]

(Next chapter is on 'consciousness', with suitably humble disclaimers !!)

I am sure he knows much more lore than I ever will, but he seems massively ignorant of umm, what's Different about a homo-sap! vs - anything he could build.


A.