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October 12, 1991
The other night, I was actually dreaming about the whole process of trying to create AI. At one end were all these people trying to do Natural Language Processing. And they had this bowl that was full of swirling grey matter - an unformed brain. And they had the bowl plugged into the wall by a power cord, and they (a bunch of scientist-types, young, in white lab coats) were holding up a copy of War and Peace to this bowl of mush and jumping up and down with frustration when nothing interesting happened.
And then my gaze shifted, and I saw these people called the Proceduralists, who I knew about from class (these were people who in trying to represent knowledge decided that everything should be represented as actions. Verbs were actions. A chair wouldn't be defined in terms of physical properties - ask a philosopher exactly what makes a chair a chair and he'll smile a wan smile in your direction - no a chair would be defined as someting you could run the SIT procedure with successfully. And so on. Which was maybe an okay system, but where a human would have no problem recognizing a model chair in a doll-house, this system didn't ever look like it could get that clever - didn't even have a mechanism to get that clever when the technology got faster), and they were holding up this bone to another bowl, and they were all wailing because the bowl didn't recognize this thing as being "fetch-able". and it all came to me that having an action associated with a sensation - like sitting with the word "chair" was a very doggy sort of characteristic to have. And I had this vision that the War and Peace scientists were trying to create this human intellect, and I thought 'futile' - and the Proceduralists, they were trying to come up with a dogbrain - and it struck me that no matter how little I thought of dogs, compared to the latest AI technology, Fido was a miracle of sophisticated reasoning. So then I thought that maybe the proper thing to do was to try to program the intelligence of like a robot paramecium, a controller for some simple machine - or maybe go full on into cell-sized world and come up with controllers for nano-technology tools. Then use what we learned there to program a worm brain, then add on to that, and add on again, all the way up the evolutionary ladder until we had a human, and then take off from there.
And I still don't know if it was a hopeful dream or not.