nan

We were very pleased that you could stop by — on your way to Senegal! That's impressive. Valeria enjoyed it very much as well, and it seemed to have a good effect. She was a lot better today. We even went out for a walk for the first time.

Don't entirely follow what you say below. About Al, the field has two parts. One is basically engineering: let's construct a driverless car, a robot that can clean the house, etc. The other is basically science: let's try to discover how the human mind works, adopting a standard procedure of constructing models, and since we're thinking of the mind as basically a computational system, computational models. Normal science.

I have never seen any difference between the kind of work that I do — and Bob, and quite a few others — and the second kind of AI, which has pretty much withered on the vine as resources are poured into the first kind — which is doubtless of considerable importance, as engineering generally is.

So it's not really clear to me what is at stake.

Noam