[WikiEN-l] "So fix it." "The next day someone will fix it back."

[William Pietri]

Ron Ritzman wrote:
> On 4/1/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> Sorry to say, but in this case it's Hofstadter, not us, who is wrong.
>> His book _Goedel, Escher, Bach_ in particular *has* inspired many
>> students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence,
>> whether to not he likes that fact.
>>     
>
> I started to wonder about that after my first post in this thread. Is
> it possible that the AI inspiration thing is a phenomenon that
> Hofstadter was unaware of.


Frankly, no. It's such a hugely influential book among geeks that had he 
slipped into a coma shortly after mailing the manuscript and only just 
awakened before the NY Times interview, he still couldn't have escaped 
noticing, as people would have built a shrine around his hospital bed.

And more prosaically, he also said so himself:

    What the book did do was excite a lot of young people. Hundreds of
    people have written to me saying it launched them on a path of
    studying computer science or cognitive science or philosophy.

 From Kevin Kelly interviewing him in Wired, November 1995. 
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/kelly.html?pg=2&topic=>


Personally, I'd guess he didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

William