Memoir of AI Thought Leaders and the Reality Club’s Early History

and Roger Schank, and Joseph Traub, head of the National Supercomputer Consortium. In 1981 with Heinz’s help, I had founded “The Reality Club” (the precursor to the non-profit Edge.org), whose initial interdisciplinary meetings took place in the Board Room at the NYAS. Heinz was working on his book, Dreams of Reason: The Rise of the Science of Complexity, which he considered to be a research agenda for science in the 1990's. Through the Reality Club meetings, I got to know two young researchers who were about to play key roles in revolutionizing computer science. At MIT in the late seventies, Danny Hillis developed the algorithms that made possible the massively parallel computer. In 1983, his company, Thinking Machines, built the world's fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture. His "connection machine," closely reflected the workings of the human mind. Seth Lloyd at Rockefeller University was undertaking seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer. And the Japanese? Their foray into artificial intelligence failed, and was followed by twenty years of anemic economic growth. But, the leading US scientists took this program very seriously. And Feigenbaum, who was the cutting-edge computer scientist of the day, teamed up with McCorduck to write a book on these developments. Zhe Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World was published in 1983. We had a code name for the project: “It’s coming, it’s coming!” But it didn’t come; it went. From that point on ’ve worked with researchers in nearly every variety of AI and complexity, including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, John Archibald Wheeler, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Henry Holland, Danny Hillis, Freeman Dyson, Chris Langton, Doyne Farmer, Geoffrey West, Stuart Russell, and Judea Pearl. An Ongoing Dynamical Emergent System From the initial meeting in Washington, CT to the present, I arranged a number of dinners and discussions in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a public event at London’s City Hall. Among the attendees were distinguished scientists, science historians, and communications theorists, all of whom have been thinking seriously about AI issues for their entire careers. I commissioned essays from a wide range of contributors, with or without references to Wiener (leaving it up to each participant). In the end, 25 people wrote essays, all individuals concerned about what is happening today in the age of AI. Deep Thinking in not my book, rather it is our book: Seth Lloyd, Judea Pearl, Stuart Russell, George Dyson, Daniel C. Dennett, Rodney Brooks, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, Steven Pinker, David Deutsch, Tom Griffiths, Anca Dragan, Chris Anderson, David Kaiser, Neil Gershenfeld, W. Daniel Hillis, Venki Ramakrishnan, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alison Gopnik, Peter Galison, George M. Church, Caroline A. Jones, Stephen Wolfram. I see The Deep Thinking Project as an ongoing dynamical emergent system, a presentation of the ideas of a community of sophisticated thinkers who are bringing their experience and erudition to bear in challenging the prevailing digital AI narrative as they 14 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016817