[Good article on Douglas Hofstadter, who — who knew? — is still hard at work. -egg]<\/p>\n
In the years after the release of GEB, Hofstadter and AI went their separate ways. Today, if you were to pull AI: A Modern Approach off the shelf, you wouldn\u2019t find Hofstadter\u2019s name\u2014not in more than 1,000 pages. Colleagues talk about him in the past tense. New fans of GEB, seeing when it was published, are surprised to find out its author is still alive.<\/p>\n
Of course in Hofstadter\u2019s telling, the story goes like this: when everybody else in AI started building products, he and his team, as his friend, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, wrote, \u201cpatiently, systematically, brilliantly,\u201d way out of the light of day, chipped away at the real problem. \u201cVery few people are interested in how human intelligence works,\u201d Hofstadter says. \u201cThat\u2019s what we\u2019re interested in\u2014what is thinking?\u2014and we don\u2019t lose track of that question.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, who knows?\u201d he says. \u201cWho knows what\u2019ll happen. Maybe someday people will say, \u2018Hofstadter already did this stuff and said this stuff and we\u2019re just now discovering it.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n
Which sounds exactly like the self-soothing of the guy who lost. But Hofstadter has the kind of mind that tempts you to ask: What if the best ideas in artificial intelligence\u2014\u201cgenuine artificial intelligence,\u201d as Hofstadter now calls it, with apologies for the oxymoron\u2014are yellowing in a drawer in Bloomington?<\/p>\n