Ron Ritzman wrote:
On 4/1/07, Delirium delirium@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