Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Where was I? 240suit when David was inside the suit. But when David was inside a sing]. layer suit, andthe other layer covered a robot, my locations remai something of a puzzle. If the puzzle isin any way more informative th the puzzles Dennett poses, Dennett deserves much of thecredit. If he ha wholly succeeded in his mission, there would have been no reason for n toembark on mine.ReflectionsSanford's story is much closer to being possible than its predecessor. In a recentarticle Marvin Minsky, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T.,discusses the prospects for this technology:You don a comfortable jacket lined with sensors and musclelike motors. Eachmotion of your arm, hand, and fingers is reproduced at another place by mobile,mechanical hands. Light, dextrous, and strong, these hands have their own sensorsthrough which you see and feel what is happening. Using this instrument, you can "work"in another room, in another city, in another country, or on another planet. Your remotepresence possesses the strength of a giant or the delicacy of a surgeon. Heat or pain istranslated into informative but tolerable sensation. Your dangerous job becomes safe andpleasant.Minsky calls this technology telepresence, a term suggested to him by Pat Gunkel,and describes the advances that have already been made.Telepresence is not science fiction. We could have a remote-controlled economy by thetwenty-first century if we start planning right now. The technical scope of such a projectwould be no greater than that of designing a new military aircraft.Some of the components of Sanford's imagined MARS system- already haveprototypes-mechanical hands with feedback systems transmitting forces and resistance,variously amplified or moderated-and there is even a step in the direction of eyevideo:A Philco engineer named Steve Moulton made a nice telepresence eye. Hemounted a TV camera atop a building and wore a helmet so that when he moved hishead, the camera on top of the building moved, and so did a viewing screen attached tothe helmet.Wearing this helmet, you have the feeling of being on top of the building andlooking around Philadelphia. If you "lean over" it's kind of creepy. But the most