[Good article on Douglas Hofstadter, who — who knew? — is still hard at work. -egg]

In the years after the release of GEB, Hofstadter and AI went their separate ways. Today, if you were to pull AI: A Modern Approach off the shelf, you wouldn’t find Hofstadter’s name—not in more than 1,000 pages. Colleagues talk about him in the past tense. New fans of GEB, seeing when it was published, are surprised to find out its author is still alive.

Of course in Hofstadter’s telling, the story goes like this: when everybody else in AI started building products, he and his team, as his friend, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, wrote, “patiently, systematically, brilliantly,” way out of the light of day, chipped away at the real problem. “Very few people are interested in how human intelligence works,” Hofstadter says. “That’s what we’re interested in—what is thinking?—and we don’t lose track of that question.”

“I mean, who knows?” he says. “Who knows what’ll happen. Maybe someday people will say, ‘Hofstadter already did this stuff and said this stuff and we’re just now discovering it.’ ”

Which sounds exactly like the self-soothing of the guy who lost. But Hofstadter has the kind of mind that tempts you to ask: What if the best ideas in artificial intelligence—“genuine artificial intelligence,” as Hofstadter now calls it, with apologies for the oxymoron—are yellowing in a drawer in Bloomington?

via The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think – James Somers – The Atlantic.