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to spend time with physicists, the reason being that they think about the universe, i.e.
everything. And no physicist was reputed to be articulate as Feynman. I couldn’t wait to
meet him. I accepted. That said, I am not a scientist, and I had never entertained the idea
of getting on a stage and delivering a “lecture” of any kind, least of all a commentary on
an obscure mathematical theory in front of a group identified as the world’s most
interesting thinkers. Only upon my arrival in Big Sur did I find out the reason for my
very late invitation. “When is Feynman’s talk?” I asked at the desk. “Oh, didn’t Alan
Watts tell you? Richard is ill and has been hospitalized. You’re his replacement. And, by
the way, what’s the title of your keynote lecture?”

I tried to make myself invisible for several days. Alan Watts, realizing that I was
avoiding the podium, woke me up one night with a 3am knock on the door of my room. I
opened the door to find him standing in front of me wearing a monk’s robe with a hood
that covering much of his face. His arms extended, he held a lantern in one hand, and a
magnum of scotch on the other.

“John”, he said in a deep voice with a rich aristocratic British accent, “you are a
phony.” “And, John”, he continued, I am a phony. But John, I am a real phony!”

The next day I gave my lecture, entitled "Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein,
and Frankenstein." Einstein: the revolution in 20th century physics; Gertrude Stein: the
first writer who made integral to her work the idea of an indeterminate and discontinuous
universe. Words represented neither character nor activity: A rose is a rose is a rose, and
a universe is a universe is a universe.); Wittgenstein: the world as limits of language.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. The end of the distinction
between observer and observed. Frankenstein: Cybernetics AI, robotics, all the essayists
in this volume.

The lecture had unanticipated consequences. Among the participants at the AUM
Conference were several authors of #1 New York Times bestsellers, yet no one there had
a literary agent. And I realized that all were engaged in writing a genre of book both
unnamed and unrecognized by New York publishers. Since I had an MBA from
Colombia Business School, and a series of relative successes in business, I was
dragooned into becoming an agent, initially for Gregory Bateson and John Lilly, whose
books I sold quickly, and for sums that caught my attention, thus kick-starting my career
as a literary agent.

I never did meet Richard Feynman.

The Long AI Winters

This new career put me in close touch with most of the AI pioneers, and over the decades
I rode with them on waves of enthusiasm, and into valleys of disappointment.

In the early ‘80s the Japanese government mounted a national effort to advance
AI. They called it the 5th Generation; their goal was to change the architecture of
computation by breaking “the von Neumann bottleneck”, by creating a massively parallel
computer. In so doing, they hoped to jumpstart their economy and become a dominant
world power in the field. In1983, the leader of the Japanese 5th Generation consortium
came to New York for a meeting organized by Heinz Pagels, the president of the New
York Academy of Sciences. I had a seat at the table alongside the leaders of the 1st
generation, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, the 2nd generation, Edward Feigenbaum

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