Hoffman.es@XEROX.ARPA (09/17/84)
The article in V2,#118, "Robot cooks if it finds the beef", reminded me of the following: ".... John McCarthy, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, is fond of talking of the day when we'll have 'kitchen robots' to do chores for us, such as fixing a lovely shrimp creole. Such a robot would, in his view, be exploitable like a slave because it would not be conscious in the slightest. To me, this is incomprehensible. Anything that could get along in the unpredictable kitchen world would be as worthy of being considered conscious as would a robot that could survive for a week in the Rockies. To me, both worlds are incredibly subtle and potentially surprise-filled. Yet I suspect that McCarthy thinks of a kitchen as ... some sort of simple and 'closed' world, in contrast to 'open-ended' worlds, such as the Rockies. This is just another example, in my opinion, of vastly under-estimating the complexity of a world we take for granted, and thus under-estimating the complexity of the beings that could get along in such a world. Ultimately, the only way to be convinced of these kinds of things is to try to write a computer program to get along in a kitchen...." Excerpted from a letter by DOUG HOFSTADTER in 'Visible Language', V17,#4, Autumn 1983. (In 1983, that periodical carried, in successive issues, an extensive piece by Knuth on his Meta-Font, a lengthy review by Hofstadter, and letters from both of them and from others.) --Rodney Hoffman