AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

Marvin kind of hated the trend towards embodiment and situated action that was on the rise at the AI lab in the 80s. He didn't think building robots was the way to AI, that it was a distraction. This was a bit curious since he did robotics in his early days, including a famous robotic arm. But now he was focused on common sense and the Society of Mind, and thought dealing with embodiment was a distraction. And he very much did not like philosophers, and the emphasis on Heidegger probably triggered a lot of hostility (with roots dating back way before my time, to his interactions with Hubert Dreyfus )

AI has a long history of ignoring its philosophical critics, thinking that technical skill trumps their tired and ancient abstractions. This is sometimes valid, but two of the classic philosophical critics Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle actually were worth paying attention to, it turns out. The same might be true of Hart, although I can't quite see it.

Man I would have liked to see a dialog between Minsky and Varela. I remember an episode in grad school where I tried to convince Marvin that all this embodiment stuff was worthwhile and a good fit with his own approach, but I didn't get anywhere. Probably the decades-old enmity between MIT-AI and Hubert Dreyfus had something to do with that.

Hubert Dreyfus

09 Jul 2022 - 24 Sep 2022

Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian

The Artificial Intelligence of Hubert L. Dreyfus: A Budget of Fallacies (attack on Dreyfus by Seymour Papert )

But his analysis would be relevant to the feasiblity of robots only if computers were necessarily constrained to conform to these simple models.