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Do not publish such AI Establishment puffery in futuro.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.
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