Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

40 years ago, and 20 years into the field:

> February, 1983

> IN previous columns I have written quite often about the field of artificial intelligence - the search for ways to program computers so that they might come to behave with flexibility, common sense, insight, creativity, self awareness, humor, and so on.

This is very amusing to me because it reads like a list of things LLMs truly stink at. Though at least they finally represent some nonzero amount of movement in that direction.

You must interact with more interesting people than I because to me LLMs have demonstrated as much "common sense, insight, creativity, self awareness, humor" as the average person I run into (actually maybe more but that makes me sound crazy to myself).

Way back someone observed that the problem was not computers thinking like people, but people thinking like computers.

I believe we've been getting a bit of the latter.

His research group has a long history of trying to tackle these problems. Some interesting reading , even if much of it hasn’t (yet?) panned out .

Eliza effect is alive and well, also.