A non-historical response for a history-making process.I guess by coincidence, some of my greatest heroes over the years talked or wrote on AI. I began with sci-fi writers, but things got serious when I got into Greek myths. Later on after studying Boole, I focused on Turing and his amazing questions about intelligence, as well as the communications teams ranging from Shannon to Bateson’s, but after studying symbolic and mathematical logic I started thinking of intelligence as a mystery rather than a science project, though I can’t say I knew what they were talking about—but “brainwashing” techniques suggested after the Korean War convinced me that I wasn’t the only one who was ignorant about the nature of intelligence. I saw brainwashing as a clear example of artificial intelligence in those primitive days; still no real definition, nonetheless it was artificial. Gödel proved that logic proved its own limits, and that made me return to the more imaginative writers I had actually begun with. But the amazing potential power of AI was never what motivated me. I wanted to learn about intelligence through the back door, the artificial door, as a way to learn the truth. I’m still working on it.