Hofstadter Making Machines Think

In the Atlantic:  An extensive article on author Douglas Hofstadter and machine learning.  We read with great gusto his book :  Godel, Escher Bach back in the 80s. Still a great readable book about the nature of intelligence and its connection to math and music.   He " ... thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind. ... "  " ... an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction—like Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple’s iPhone assistant—in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think. ... "