http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=2144 is a thread at the Skeptic Magazine about the new Volume 12, Issue No. 2, 2006, which includes a front-cover article by Peter Kassan entitled A.I. Gone Awry: The Futile Quest for Artificial Intelligence.
http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=37430#37430 is my A.I. Gone A-Whitewash (Rebuttal to A.I. Gone Awry) -- below. This morning I chanced upon http://www.sl4.org/archive/0603/14418.html Kassan: A.I. Gone Awry in a forum devoted to AI and the Singularity. Later in the day I stopped in at a magazine store and they said that the new issue would not come in until mid-April. But then I remembered to check the University Book Store where I had worked in the summer before I entered graduate school at U Cal Berkeley: Bingo! The clerk said that the new issue of The Skeptic had come in a few minutes ago. The "A.I. Gone Awry" article by Peter Kassan on pages 30-39 was very impressive but extremely disappointing. Like some puff-piece websites like TheEdge.com, the AI article was written entirely from the point-of-view (POV) of the academic AI Establishment. Sure, the article gave an exhaustive history of academic AI, but it made no mention at all of the exciting progress in http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/agiradar.html independent AI projects -- where the race is on and there is no publish-or-perish academic foot-dragging. Peter Kassan's article stated that there is no general http://mind.sourceforge.net/theory5.html theory of neuroscience -- but I beg to differ, because I spent fourteen years of my collegiate youth and beyond in a mighty and successful effort to formulate a theory of neuroscience as a basis for True AI. That the article ended with three entire pages of academic references was truly impressive, as were Kassan's observations interspersed amid the citations, but they were all non-hacker, non-maverick, non-garage-tinkerer publications of the glacially slow academic AI Establishment. In short, the cover article was a waste of paper and a waste of front-page prominence. You have been warned, The Skeptic Magazine. Do not publish such AI Establishment puffery in futuro. All your front-page AI article are belong to us. ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
