That is quite some condemnation :) I am certainly interested and hope you will flesh out your positions. Certainly Brooks ran into Moravecs paradox, that walki

That is quite some condemnation :) I am certainly interested and hope you will flesh out your positions. Certainly Brooks ran into Moravecs paradox, that walking is the hardest form of thinking and playing chess and planning less so. And so Brooksian embodied robotics never got to the symbolic level. Contrary to your anthropocentric claim, Brooks (and followers such as Tilden) were biomimetically inspired by the intelligence of insect locomotion and 'intelligent' engineering like the underslung chassy of spiders and beetle. I do agree with Brooks that AI will not emerge in simulation due to the lack of real stochasticity and resolution. [/edit] I will temper my stridency and say that it is less likely, my initial absolutist position was merely excitement and really simulation has a big role to play as imagination and plan testing. We live in a world of perception and as [Richard] Gregory says "perception is only a hypothesis, based on our prior knowledge and updated by reality". For instance the Atari benchmarks appears random but the randomness is Mersenne Twisters with few seeds and most expert (human) arcade players learn the patterns. That is not to say that Mnih wt al.s Nature paper wasn't groundbreaking and their Deep-Q RL is certainly insightful, promising and useful but (IMHO) the AI 'stack' and LeCun's Predictive Learning will not come about outside of a real robot acting in the world and using raw sensor data to power actuators directly. My position is not entirely Brooksian. I follow Esther Thelen in the view that a being ( a brain and a body ) needs to learn to be by being and moving and feeling and touching. I do apologise if my brevity and excitement appears rude, AI could well emerge in computers running simulations and in fact I think that simulation can play the role of planning and imagination but it will need to be grounded in a real physical agent - a hybrid approach will bear the most fruit.