Talk:W. Daniel Hillis

message: :One could easily portray Hillis’s interest in clock-building as a symptom of a mid-life crisis. After all, the older you get, the more interesting time seems to you. Perhaps, having failed to create real AI, the guy was reviewing his own life, and feeling his own death moving closer? Perhaps he found it comforting to remind himself how little it matters, from a 10,000 year viewpoint, whether any one human or any one company succeeds at doing any one thing? No doubt, there is an element of truth to this view. But this doesn’t seem to be a terribly large aspect of his motivation for pursuing the clock project – not as large, for example, as his sheer love of building cool stuff. And of course, both a thinking machine and a 10,000 year clock are Big Things – projects that appeal to the entrepreneurial, adventurous, overambitious soul.
absurd, and unabashedly pov.
Agreed. This definately has no place in an encyclopedia.
The two paragraphs preceeding it can also be construed as pov and are just wretched pieces of writing. 
:Among all his inventions, the clock is definitely one of the coolest – one that would make any MIT hacker proud. And it resonates with something deep and powerful in the human soul – the same aspect of human essence that finds the Cheops Pyramid more impressive than the Nintendo Game Boy, in spite of the incredible complexity of the hardware and software engineering involved in the latter. The Clock of the Long Now appeals to our embodiedness, to our embeddedness in space and time, whereas Hillis’s work on AI, like most AI work, ignored embodiedness and embeddedness and focused mainly on cognition, abstract thinking, on the most rarefied parts of the mind.
:Abstractly, one could build a mind operating a thousand times faster than a human mind, or a thousand times slower. 10,000 years would mean something different to each of these differently time-scaled minds. But the mathematics and theory of AI would apply equally well to all of them, as would many of the same hardware engineering principles. The Clock of the Long Now is focused on palpable human reality, not the abstract mathematics of mind or the subtleties of hardware engineering. In fact it represents a step back from fancy modern electrical engineering. Modern technology provides few systems of 10,000-year durability, and so the design of the Clock of the Long Now required a number of purely engineering innovations.
I removed a few of the most POV paragraphs.  Article is still not good, though.  --Xyzzyplugh 21:50, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Wretched indeed. The writing is simply awful. It's full of cliché, grammatical errors, imprecision, and even the substance doesn't seem to be thought through at all well. It verges on stream-of-consciousness. The sentences are long and poorly constructed. The comparison to Hofstadter* is absurd. This is purplish, self-regarding, melodramatic prose of the worst kind. It's Anne Rice writing a post on the atheist sub-reddit. That's how bad the writing is.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.101.47.254 (talk) 10:27, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: haha

message: Dear Wiki Editors, Danny Hillis was written about in the last critical section of the book "Nudist on the Late Shift" by Po Bronson. Should that be added to the references section? thanks Frank. Fbrazile (talk) 00:21, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing reference to Po Bronson's book? 

message: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/neurology_neurosurgery/experts/profiles/team_member_profile/282E92445B3DD806F8BE87319AF61F04/Argye_Hillis
I believe this is the correct and working link.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.180.98.43 (talk) 15:05, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Working Link for 4th foot note