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...I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine.
UPDATE: Can't help myself. This Lisp quote is too good=).
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Lisp was great at the time of its inception if only for a radically new way of using machines. It has suffered the fate of having been elevated to a status of de facto standard with all its defects. Despite its conceptual novelty a lot of the design of Lisp is terribly amateurish even by the standards of the time. When I read the first manual, the Lisp 1.5 manual, published in 1961, I could not believe my eyes. It was an extremely poor language. Now it has become the defacto standard of the AI community, which now suffers from Lisp, the way the rest of the world suffered from Fortran.