The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" is one of my favorite books, and I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for Hofstadter... so I'm really disappointed and saddened to read that he (quoting from the article) "hasn't been to an artificial-intelligence conference in 30 years. 'There's no communication between me and these people,' he says of his AI peers. 'None. Zero. I don't want to talk to colleagues that I find very, very intransigent and hard to convince of anything. You know, I call them colleagues, but they’re almost not colleagues -- we can't speak to each other.'"Hofstadter should be COLLABORATING with all those other researchers who are working with statistical methods, emulating biology, and/or pursuing other approaches!  He should be looking at approaches like Geoff Hinton's deep belief networks and brain-inspired systems like Jeff Hawkins's NuPIC, and comparing and contrasting them with his own theories and findings!  The converse is true too: all those other researchers should be finding ways to collaborate with Hofstadter.  It could very well be that a NEW SYNTHESIS of all these different approaches will be necessary for us to understand how complex, multi-layered models consisting of a very large number of 'mindless' components ultimately produce what we call "intelligence."All these different approaches to research are -- or at least should be -- complementary.