A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful.

We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.