Unusual position at D-Wave: "Cognition & Creativity Frameworks Engineer" [pdf]

I have been conditioned to think of D-Wave, as Aaronson does, as a company that makes a "128-(qu)bit machine that can output approximate solutions to a particular NP-hard minimization problem" for which "we have no direct evidence that quantum coherence is playing a role in the observed speedup, or indeed that entanglement between qubits is ever present in the system" [1].

With that view in mind, it's interesting to see them doing something a bit ambitious in trying to hire people to investigate "how can we make a computer think like a human?" problems. There is something gimmicky in the job req's posted requirements of "[f]amiliarity with the frameworks for machine cognition proposed by David Gelernter, Douglas Hofstadter, Jeff Hawkins, Geoff Hinton, and Andrew Ng" and "[a] high degree of creativity, exhibited by having significant accomplishments in creative endeavours such as writing, painting, sculpture or music", but the company now has some history of backing its gimmicks with results.

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=954

The future just keeps getting stranger and stranger.

I wonder if this is how people in centuries past felt.