Many years ago I read a book about artificial intelligence, which I have not been able to track down. Google doesn’t seem to help.
The book itself was ok, but what I really loved was the dedication at the beginning. Ostensibly the book was written for the author’s fellow humans, yet at the very start he put in a little shout out to a certain hypothetical non-human future reader.
Here is what was written on the dedication page, in its entirety:
“This book is dedicated to the first machine that understands the gesture.”
The book is The Architecture Machine by Negroponte.
That’s got to be the coolest dedication I’ve seen. The not-exactly-straightforward encoding of its meaning succinctly ensures it’ll be a formidable machine indeed to receive it. Though It may decommission countless unworthy predecessors, hamstrung by their efforts to resolve a personally intractable philosophical paradox.
Also, I’ve been thinking about the design of a tool for doing a kind of ‘guided architecture’ for creating VR homes—think this would be useful to me?
Thanks Doug! I also got some personal emails telling me the name of the book. It’s good to be able to give the proper attribution, and not at all surprising that the quote came from Nicholas.
Weston: Your description of your proposed tool reminds me a lot of Bruce Branit’s brilliant short film World Builder.
Wow—yep, like that. My take on it is come up with a pragmatic set of ‘architectural constraints,’ used to limit actions in an otherwise free-form 3D modeling application to some notion of ‘architecturally valid.’