This failing has only encouraged more contention among the AI community. Hogan's hopefulness of AI research seems to mirror that of today's progressive thinkers such as Doug Lenat and Vernor Vinge. Lenat, once an AI pessimist, discovered in his CYC project that stringing together semantic concepts and forming associations will lead to the development of language comprehension in the same way a human infant acquires it. Conversely, Hogan enumerates the pessimism, which shrouds a contingent of the AI community. The fact that intelligent machines are possible raises many concerns.
People feel threatened when their unique sensibilities are called into question.
Hubert Dreyfess, a student of physics and later a Philosophy professor at MIT holds the position that humanlike intelligence cannot be imitated through symbolic representation. This tenet was in direct opposition of the rule-based efforts of Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar and David Marr's Theory of Vision, both of whom were at MIT the same time as Dreyfess. This non-fiction book is for the technological handicapped as well as technologically adept who are interested in Artificial Intelligence from its inception. Hogan describes concepts in an easy and sometimes humorous manner. I recommend this book to everyone who has faith in technology and a proclivity towards the ambitious endeavors of mankind.