There Are Three Basic Approaches

General Fiction Is Pretty Much About Ways That People Get Into Problems And Screw Their Lives Up. Science Fiction Is About Everything Else.

In General, We’re Least Aware Of What Our Minds Do Best.

A Computer Is Like A Violin. You Can Imagine A Novice Trying first A Phonograph And Then A Violin. The Latter, He Says, Sounds Terrible. That Is The Argument We Have Heard From Our Humanists And Most Of Our Computer Scientists. Computer Programs Are Good, They Say, For Particular Purposes, But They Aren’t flexible. Neither Is A Violin, Or A Typewriter, Until You Learn How To Use It.

We Turn To Quantities When We Can't Compare The Qualities Of Things.

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.