Early AI systems tended to constrain themselves to micro-domains that could be sufficiently described using simple ontologies and binary predicate lo… - Joscha Bach

Normally we only get attention in the parts of our mind that create heat, where you have a mismatch between [the] model and the results that are happening. So most people are not self-aware, because their control is too good. If everything works out roughly the way you want, and the only things that don't work out are whether your football team wins, then you will mostly have models about these domains. ...It's only when... your fundamental relationships through the world don't work [that, attention or self-awareness arises].

At some point you have to understand the comedy of your own situation. If you take yourself seriously, and you are not functional, it ends in tragedy, as it did for Nietzsche. ...[Y]ou find the same thing in Hesse... The Steppenwolf syndrome is classic in all its sense, where you... feel misunderstood by the world and you don't understand that all the misunderstandings are the result of your own lack of self-awareness, because you think that you are [the] prototypical human and the others around you should behave the same way as you expect... based on your innate instincts; and it doesn't work out, and you become a transcendentalist to deal with that. ...It's very... understandable and I have great sympathies for this, to the degree that I can have sympathy for my own intellectual history. But you have to grow out of it.

The last big things that we discovered was the constructivist turn in mathematics... to understand that the parts of mathematics that work are computation. That was a very significant discovery in the first half of the 20th century. ...[I]t hasn't fully permeated philosophy and even physics yet. Physicists checked out the code libraries for mathematics before constructivism became universal. ...Gödel himself ...didn't get it yet. Hilbert could get it. Hilbert saw that [e.g.,] Cantor's set theoretic experiments in mathematics led him to contradictions, and he noticed that with the current semantics we cannot build a computer in mathematics that runs mathematics without crashing, and Gödel... could prove this.