The author (ATM) of
AI4U was an abject failure in life.
As a boy in the jungles of the Panama Canal Zone,
he discovered the seductive joys of exploration and
learning. If he had stuck with climbing the mango tree
and following the pathways of the leaf-cutter ants,
he would have been okay, but one day by the
BOQ he
found an Army battery lying on the ground and he became
intrigued by the phenomenon of sparks coruscating from
wire to pole for no apparent reason that made any sense.
Returning to the United States, ATM experimented with
wires and batteries, light bulbs and switches, relays
and induction coils, radio receivers and transmitters.
Then the worst possible thing happened -- computers!
2. Science Fiction as Escape From Life
The escapist literature of comic books, fairy tales,
science fiction and spy novels rendered little Teddy's
deranged mind unfit for modern American life beneath
the wheel of the bourgeois rat race in a consumer society.
As he tried to build his own computer out of
electromechanical relays, books and movies about
artificial intelligence fried his brain by firing
his imagination. Sitting in catechism class at church,
ATM wondered where in the human brain was the ultimate
decision-maker for good and evil. If all action results
from the firing of nerve cells, what causes the firing?
We know what happens when a child asks too many questions.
Daydreaming, underachievement and immaturity result.
As our author ATM tried to keep one foot in the unreal
world of science fiction and the other foot grounded
in the real world of jobs and careers and mortgages,
a strange thing happened -- the ground shifted beneath
his feet, the goalposts got moved and his cheese was stolen.
After graduate school at U Cal Berkeley,
ATM solved AI.
The Americans landed on the moon, personal computers
became ubiquitous, and science fiction swamped reality.
3. Enter the Internet
So ATM/Mentifex bought himself a Coleco ADAM and used its
300-baud modem to make his first Internet Usenet post in 1985.
Did the readers of AI netnews rush to embrace Mentifex AI
with open arms? Au contraire, mon frere! M*ntifex-bashing
became a favorite blood sport of the AI Establishment.
4. Banned in Bitland
Over time, Mentifex was banned or hounded out of many
islands in the clickstream of the Internet and the Web.
#ai chat wiki
CogNews
Everything2.com
Generation5
Robots.Net
SL4
Witch-hunt-pedia (Wikipedia)
5. Qui Vult Decipi, Decipiatur
It was always the half-educated and the half-savvy
who obstreperated most strenuously against Mentifex AI.
We don't want to call them half-wits, unless the shoe fits.
Typically they were people whose favorite reading was
Lord of the Rings (imdb LOTR), whose spelling was atrocious,
and wannabes who could not get their own AI project going
and were determined to wreck anybody else's AI start-up.
They tried to make it fashionable to deprecate Mentifex.
Instead of attacking ideas, they ranted ad hominem.
Insterad of welcoming another searcher along the path to
True AI, they tried to label ATM as a
crank and
crackpot.
In the annus mirabilis of 2006, ATM tumbled to the
disgusting, greedy reason behind the most vicious and most
persistent attacks against him, and why the shrill insults
grew louder and more vehement in direct proportion to his
success at creating
free AI source code and
free AI software.
The reason was a new breed of scam in the world, the Singularity
scam. Along with identity thieves and Internet phishers, there
was now an opportunity for unprincipled, stop-at-nothing scamsters
to solicit donations from the gullible in preparation for the
arrival of the
Technological Singularity. A man could stand on
a freeway on-ramp with a money-bucket and a sign proclaiming that
the Singularity is near -- donate now to prevent a catastrophe.
Suddenly it all made $en$e to Mentifex. The reason why his
fiercest critics objected to his giving
True AI away for free
was that it threatened their revenue stream of donations from
starry-eyed suckers who believed their vaporous talk of AI
progress and the need to pay for pre-Singularity precautions.
And, oh! it was a beautiful scam. You did not even need a college
education to take part in it and to rake in the donated dollars.
All you needed was to go around and call everyone but your own
fanboys a crackpot. You and your adoring (share-the-wealth) fanboys
were the one true (we are smart; you money-donors are stupid)
gang of experts with an exclusive vision of the artificial intelligence
that was going to come Real Soon Now if people donated enough money.
The bookies wept, the con men celebrated, and Carlo Ponzi rolled over.
6. A Tide in the Affairs of Men
As Shakespeare wrote,
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Mentifex (ATM) stood his AI ground and could not do otherwise.
Artifiical intelligence was the only game in town that appealed to him.
Why people would not accept him as a fellow AI practitioner
trying to communicate and share his
philosophic insights that
had taken him years to accumulate, ATM could only gue$$.
7. Nothing Succeeds Like Success
A funny thing happened on the way to the
Singularity.
Mentifex, the fizzled-out failure and butt of bigotry,
began to succeed at making waves in the tides of AI.
On 4 May 2006 the famous cyberpunk author
Bruce Sterling
put a
Mentifex link into his Wired blog for WIRED Magazine.
Hundreds of hits came in and hundreds of AI memes went out.
On 7 June 2006 there was an
AI breakthrough in the
Mind.Forth AI software. Suddenly the
Forthmind could
follow a logical chain of associations and not spout
gibberish based on spurious associations.
Mr. Doyon fiercely contradicted some previous Amazon AI4U
reviews that were so negative in tone and so vicious in attack that
AI4U sales on Amazon and elsewhere almost (but not quite) slowed
to a standstill -- as can be seen from the chart of AI4U sales.
8. Sales History of AI4U
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2002 +35
2003 +3 +7 +3 +3 +3 +7 +2 +4 +3 +3 +2 +5
2004 +4 +1 +3 +0 +1 +1 +0 +1 +0 +1 +2 +0
2005 +0 +0 +2 +3 +0 +1 +1 +0 +2 +2 +0 +0
2006 +0 +2 +2 +1 +1 +1 +1 +2 +2 +0 +1
The
AI4U FAQ links to a more complete
Sales History of AI4U.
Obviously, judging from the paltry AI4U sales figures, Mentifex
never got rich from publishing his alternative AI textbook and he
was lucky to recoup his outlay of US $165.00 that he had to pay
to "self-publish" his AI book in hardbound and paperback editions.
Since AI4U was available to read free-of-charge on-line, there was
no need to
buy the AI-For-You textbook, and the following ideas
were only suggestions for what to do once you had a hardcopy AI4U.
9. Future History of AI4U
Add AI4U to the holdings of one more prestigious library, beyond
Offer AI4U for sale on
E-Bay, citing your own ideas on AI.
Tag AI4U as such in a
flickr photo of your creative workspace.
For high school teachers and museum docents, a special use of AI4U
involves dedicating a computer to the running of
Mind.html or
Mind.Forth
while a copy of AI4U sits nearby for interested students to examine.
For you as a reviewer of books on Amazon, consider how generations
yet unborn and nations yet unknown will read and ponder how the
truth finally came out when you wrote your immortal review of AI4U.
If it feels good, go for footnotes and stint not with literary allusions.
Pen a review with something for everybody -- a droll review of famous
moments in M*ntifex bashing, or reportage on the state of the art in AI.
Perhaps write a review of all the other reviews, assigning stars of
thumbs up or thumbs down, with factual corrections of all the lies
and outright inaccuracies. Become a force to be reckoned with among la creme de la creme de l'elite du monde de l'intelligence artificielle.
