I came of age in the provocative environment of the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory in the 1970s, a time of excitement and optimism about
the imminent prospect of understanding and replicating the machinery of
the human mind. To put it mildly, this quest has turned out to be harder
than then expected; in retrospect, trying to construct human-scale intelligence
using a one-megabyte, one-megahertz mainframe computer seems
almost whimsical. Nonetheless, the continuing important effort has already
stimulated myriad advances in science, engineering, and philosophy.
It is the last of these domains that I turn to here.