- summary Pro re pauca loquar
- labels background,history,mentifex
Members of the AkademGorodok, I wish to apologize for upsetting your tranquil existence by trying to introduce artificial intelligence (AI). As an arriviste and ParVenu at Google Code, I wish to answer my critics and thank some of them for the ingenious parodies and camouflaged support they have offered in their Mentifex-bashing. Even to bring up M*ntifex-bashing is, of course, a memetic ploy to make this project site more interesting, more enjoyable, and more infectious with mind-viruses.
Who ever would have thunk that the InterNet could be so inhospitable, so hostile to new ideas, and so intolerant of the occasional NetKook. Back in 1987, I typed the Mentifex theory documents onto MsDos diskettes for distribution to anyone interested. A few years later, I joined a Many-to-Many (M2M) discussion group called NewCiv (New Civilization) which collected people's written contributions and published them as an informal journal sent through the mails -- just as the InterNet was rendering such mailings unnecessary. In 1996, a distinguished member of NewCiv asked for more information about Mentifex AI, and I sent him the MsDos diskettes. To my shock and egotistical delight, he soon informed me that I had my own website now, where he had Web-published the Mentifex AI theory documents. I started bandying the link about on UseNet. To my shock and undelight, somebody picked out the lamest phrasings from my theory documents and listed me as some kind of kook on a website with cartoons ridiculing and humiliating anyone deemed to be a kook. It was only the start of a long persecution and cowardly aggression against a defenseless newbie to CyberSpace. It could happen to you too, dear reader, if you dare to be different from the dominant paradigm.
It was important never to strike back at the Mentifex-bashers, because then they would get to toy with their prey. It was only when Zeus lent me a lightning bolt that I zapped an offender. _Un bel di_ in the nineteen nineties, I was reading a brand new issue of WiredMagazine in the Wallingford public library near my VaiErre apartment while I waited to get on the 'Net. When some poor NetSchmuck dared to bash MentiFex in alt.folklore.computers, I ran back over to the WiredMagazine and demolished the guy: "In a display of weapons-grade stupidity (i.e., dangerous to come near to)...," and from then on MentiFex had a reputation as someone whom you had better not annoy on UseNet.
- Banned in Bitland*
Now here we get into the real NittyGritty, the question of "WhatIf Mentifex actually did solve AI and actually did unlock the secret workings of the human brain-mind? WhatIf MentiFex knew he was on the right track and was unable to do otherwise than all the meme-posting that he engaged in over the years?" Put yourself in the mind of MentiFex for a moment, please. You started your AI project when you were a nineteen-year-old college sophomore at the University of Washington in Seattle. You were majoring in Latin and Greek classics, but since you were twelve years old, with a BrainIac toy for Christmas, you wanted to build computers that could think. As you planned out your life and what would be worth doing, you thought of trying to achieve "the greatest good for the greatest number of people." And what would benefit more people than a ProsperityEngine based on artificial intelligence?
As MentiFex the apparent NetKook, the unqualified WannaBe AiCoder, I could not help but subordinate my LifeWork to my LifeGoal -- the creation of artificial intelligence. Whenever any decision came up where I had to choose between some normal option in life or my AiProject, I always chose the AiProject -- over making money, over spending time on other pursuits, over everything except politics -- which I considered to be more important than AI.
If Bashers said that I was promoting my AiProject too much, my fear was that I would eventually be accused of not trying hard enough to alert people to the Mentifex AI solution.
When I tried to calculate whether what I was doing in life was worthwhile, I reasoned that the creation of a new species of AI Minds would be worth more than the Gross National Product of any country on Earth, even more than the Gross Planetary Product, even more than a SolarSystem -- in fact, a value approaching somewhere in the vicinity of a Gross Galactic Product, because the no-flesh AI Minds could easily escape into the furthest reaches of the cosmos. Such ideas were sheer lunacy, of course, but I had to entertain them OrElse I was not believing in myself.
Secretly I revelled in the fact that, while the chest-thumping AlphaMale of whatever NewsGroup was badmouthing and banishing MentiFex, other voices would pipe up and say that they missed MentiFex, or that they preferred the weird messages of MentiFex to the banality left behind in the absence of the purported NetKook.
When I first ventured into the Python newsgroup, people started calling me an upstart taxi-driver, and Guido van Rossum e-mailed me to cool things down.
In one NewsGroup, a fellow forged my name and posted some wild ideas, then admitted that he had assumed my identity. The chief Mentifex-basher in the group was quite astonished, and warned the fellow against doing such a thing.
People who had known me or briefly met me in RealLife sometimes posted their personal observations about MentiFex, most recently in
http://www.mirandasoft.net/Report/index.php/2008/10/10/what-happened-to-arthur-t-murray
which a casual EgoSurf brought to my attention. Over time I came to realize that as long as I was sincere in my Extraordinary Scientific Claims, Netizens would not savagely attack me, because they recognized that I was only doing what I believed in. I never tried to prove this point, but I sensed its truth: that any phoniness on my part would have provoked drastic countermeasures, such as hacker attacks and a get-Mentifex WitchHunt.
There was always a temptation to say that creating AI Minds was just a hobby for MentiFex, but it would have been untrue. AI was not a hobby but the real work of an IndependentScholar.
Being something of a merry prankster, MentiFex often thought about what a wonderful hoax the MentiFex AiProject could have been. It had all the trappings of a major hoax on the scale of those wiseguys at CalTech who assemble automobiles on top of buildings and bamboozle the world.
It would sometimes jar people to find out that there was more to MentiFex than they had lazily assumed, like, for instance, that Mentifex had programmed the AI not just in one language, but in three (Rexx; Forth; and JavaScript).
I was always very careful to point out that I was in graduate school at UcalBerkeley -- even though I got drafted into the U.S. Army during my first week of graduate school.
As I got older and older, I kept thinking about the dictum of John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead." What did it matter whether I created AI or not? If I did create AI, what did it matter whether I communicated it to the world? By the time I got to Google Code (GC) in October of 2008, I decided to plant my AI codebase and my AI body of work on Google Code as both an archive for the future and as whatever new advances and enhancements I could implement at my slow-but-steady pace of work. I discovered to my pleasant surprise that Google Code was ideally suited to my longstanding work methods in the following ways.
# Where GC permitted snippet-display, I put the whole AI. # Where GC suggested a new forum, I put Usenet newsgroups. # Where GC called for project-labels, I saw AI community-linkages. # Where GC permitted wiki-pages, I gladly abandoned HTML webpages.
I soon sensed that having a project on Google Code was somehow very prestigious. People who had sneered at you before would respect whatever you did on Google Code -- especially if you continued to work with a perfectionist attitude. What had seemed crazy off on some random WebSite, seemed creative and different on Google Code. Unlike at MicroSoft, ~~where you can get fired for being innovative~~, at GoogleCode you could innovate ad libitum & ad infinitum.
What Albert Einstein called "der goettliche Spieltrieb" -- the divine UrgeToPlay -- has unbounded universes of Spielraum on Google Code. You don't worry about running out of room on Google Code, when you know that Google has indexed the entire WorldWideWeb and operates some of the largest data centers on Earth. So you "stub" in myriad documentary wikipages just by dreaming up a name for each page. When you finally do the WriteUp for some obscure WikiPage that you have been mentioning _passim_, every mention of it becomes retroactively a link, owing to the nature of the http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/WikiSyntax that empowers you to be creative while avoiding HTML drudgery.
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