🚀 go-pugleaf

Archive-name: auto/comp.ai.philosophy/unpublished-chapters-of-The-Turing-Option

I have archived two unpublished chapters of "The Turing Option" by
Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, published by Warner Books, August
1992.  Use  
  ftp wuarchive.wustl.edu  (and then login with name "anonymous")
  cd doc/minsky
  get option.chapters

These chapters have a lot of far-out ideas about how to build a
humanlike machine. Harry Harrison and I have been longtime friends.
One day he said that he liked my book 'The Society of Mind' and
suggested that the ideas could reach a larger audience if I wrote a
version in the form of a novel.  When I said I didn't have the talent
for that, he offered to collaborate.  We decided that the central
character Brian would be a mathematical super-hacker of the future who
would build the first AI with a human-like mind. Harry drafted the
action plot, and I suppled the technical stuff. While our hero is
building his robot (in the year 2023) he is shot in the head by
mysterious criminals who steal the prototype.  This lets us explain
computational aspects of the theory in the context of repairing
Brian's brain, while also explaining psychological aspects in the
context of reconstructing his childhood memories.

A co-author does not have complete control.  These FTP chapters are
part of the text I wrote that did not make it into the published book.
Both Harry and the editor at Warner thought they would slow down the
story too much.  At the time I disagreed, but now I think they were
right...