I made my living writing technical papers about AI, more or less. So you might think that writing something nontechnical like this book would be a piece of cake, a stroll in the park. Uh, no. This book was certainly a labor of love, but it was harder for me to write than anything technical.
I was fortunate to have a number of people help me with it. Ernie Davis encouraged me to get started in the first place, and was kind enough to read and comment on a rough first draft. I was also glad to get comments on a subsequent draft from Toryn Klassen, my brothers John and Paul, my daughter Michelle, and four anonymous reviewers. They helped to at least steer the book in a direction, since apparently I had somehow managed to leave port without much of an idea of where I was headed. I’m also grateful for comments on a later draft from Gerhard Lakemeyer, Don Perlis, Vaishak Belle, and Gary Marcus. The book is much better thanks to all their efforts. But of course, they are not to blame for any errors and confusions that remain.
I also want to thank the people at the MIT Press. Marie Lufkin Lee was kind and encouraging even when I had nothing more than a sketchy draft. Kathleen Hensley managed a lot of the practical details, and Michael Sims handled the copyediting, transforming my shaky grammar and wording into something more sturdy.
I wrote some of the book while I was a visiting researcher in Rome. I want to thank Giuseppe de Giacomo and the good folks at the Sapienza—Università di Roma for their friendship and hospitality. I actually completed the bulk of the work after I had retired from the University of Toronto. To have the chance to put as little or as much time as you want on a project of your own devising, how good is that?
I would also like to thank my family and friends who cheered me on from the start. “Why don’t you try writing something that normal people can read?” they would sometimes ask, or more diplomatic words to that effect. This book might be the closest I ever get, even if it remains a tad academic in spots. But in case I don’t get a chance to do anything like it again, I want to express my gratitude more broadly.
Let me start by thanking my brother Paul who drove me to Toronto to see the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey when it first came out. As a high-school student, I’m not sure I “got it” at the time, but I did get the impact, the incredible attention to detail. While others were marveling at the trippy aspects of the movie (it being the late sixties and all), I was marveling at the idea of a computer like HAL. It changed my life, and you will see references to 2001 throughout this book.
I began as a university student soon thereafter, thanks to the efforts of a high-school guidance counselor who got me a scholarship in engineering. But I found engineering incredibly tedious, demanding but not rewarding, except for a single course on computers. I knew at that point that Marvin Minsky, who had consulted on 2001, was on the faculty in engineering at MIT. So I wrote him a letter asking about this. I want to thank the late Professor Minsky for taking the time and trouble to write to a first-year undergraduate—this was well before the days of email!—encouraging him to get out of electrical engineering and into computer science. I might not have been able to walk away from my engineering scholarship had my grandfather not left money for his grandchildren’s education. But he did, and so I walked, and this too changed my life.
In computer science, I was very fortunate to come under the wing of John Mylopoulos, the one faculty member in Toronto interested in AI at the time. He taught a new course on AI that I took and loved, he gave me a summer job, he took me on as a graduate student, and he helped me very patiently as I meandered toward a PhD topic some distance away from his area of interest. He also introduced me to Ron Brachman, who was visiting from Boston. Ron was kind enough to offer me a summer job in Boston, and after my PhD, a job in California, where I got to work with him for three glorious years. John also worked very hard to get me an academic position back in Toronto, which ended up being a dream job for me for the rest of my career. John and Ron are the only two bosses I have ever known, and I owe my career to the two of them.
I can hear the music in the background getting louder, so let me wrap this up by thanking my dear wife Pat for having been there for me throughout my career, through ups and downs, from undergrad to pensioner. Like it says on the first page, this one is for her.
Toronto, July 2016