Category: History
How Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok Have Changed Their Views on AI and Where They Disagree
From the Archives-written by ChatGPT.
Both became dramatically more confident in AI’s capabilities while remaining optimistic about its economic potential. Their differences concern how benefits arrive, how seriously to weight emerging dangers, and whether AI might possess consciousness. Cowen emphasizes institutions, bottlenecks, and geopolitical competition. Tabarrok emphasizes inexpensive intelligence, scientific discovery, and—especially in his later writing—concrete safety failures.
The dated passages below trace those changes across the public archive. Quotations are the authors’ own words, including excerpts from their columns; outside material they reproduce is identified separately.
Early views on unequal gains and abundance
Cowen’s early framework grew out of chess. On March 11, 2011, he observed that stronger computers required stronger human partners:
“The required education level — for the team’s ‘wage premium’ — is ratcheted up.”
His concern was already distributional: computers could increase productivity while changing which human skills commanded a premium. He also emphasized learning how to work with computers. What I learn from chess and computers.
Tabarrok’s April 12, 2016 argument was more explicitly reassuring:
“AI will be cheap and ownership will be widespread.”
He compared AI to an increase in the world’s supply of educated people: more intelligence produces useful ideas, and competition spreads the benefits to consumers. But his forecast of comprehensive substitution was cautious—AI becoming a perfect substitute for human intelligence could be “100 years or more” away. Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class?
Neither position was absolute. Cowen warned in February 2017 that the Industrial Revolution involved decades of painful adjustment; historical progress did not guarantee quick wage gains. Tabarrok, in October 2019, praised the argument that mediocre automation could displace workers without creating enough additional wealth to compensate. See Cowen’s historical warning and Tabarrok’s Beware the Mediocre Robots!
Rising confidence in AI capabilities from 2020 to 2025
Cowen was already optimistic about language models in July 2020. After publishing a skeptical reader’s assessment of GPT-3, he added:
“I remain bullish, but it is always worth considering other opinions.”
That attribution matters: the skeptical arguments in the post were the reader’s, not Cowen’s. The case against the import of GPT-3, July 23, 2020.
Tabarrok’s shift toward near-term transformative AI became unmistakable by March 2, 2023:
“I never expected to witness the birth of aliens.”
Later that month, he endorsed Microsoft researchers’ description of GPT-4 as exhibiting an incomplete form of general intelligence: “They are correct.” This is a substantial acceleration from his 2016 outlook, although perfect substitution for humans and early general intelligence are different thresholds. See AGI is Coming and Baby AGI is Here, March 24, 2023.
Cowen reached an especially explicit formulation on April 16, 2025, discussing o3:
“I think it is AGI, seriously.”
But he immediately separated capability from adoption:
“It still will take us a long time to use it properly.”
His growing enthusiasm about the technology did not imply an equally dramatic forecast for immediate economic growth. o3 and AGI, is April 16th AGI day?
Economic transformation and the pace of adoption
On January 6, 2025, Tabarrok wrote:
“The intelligence revolution is going to be bigger, more impactful and more wrenching than the industrial revolution.”
This is his own concluding sentence, following a quotation from Sam Altman. The Intelligence Revolution.
Cowen’s February 23, 2025 response to rapid-takeoff expectations focused on a different constraint:
“Human bottlenecks become more important, the more productive is AI.”
Energy, regulation, organizational habits, and weak human collaborators can constrain the economic value of better models. He offered an explicitly tentative estimate of an additional half percentage point of annual growth—large when compounded, but far from an immediate economic explosion. Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow.
By September 3, 2026, Tabarrok was developing the distributional implications:
“A smaller share of a much larger economy can still mean more income for labor.”
He argued that even substantial displacement could leave aggregate labor income higher, or make compensation affordable. He explicitly acknowledged painful losses for particular workers. His high-growth calculations are scenarios, not forecasts. How Much Redistribution Will AI Require?
They also converge more than their rhetoric suggests. In May 2026, Cowen rejected mass unemployment while identifying transitional hiring problems. In August 2026, Tabarrok interpreted business-survey evidence as consistent with their shared position that AI had not yet broadly reduced employment. See Cowen, May 13, and Tabarrok, August 31.
Growing attention to safety and institutional limits
Cowen stated his central position on November 19, 2023:
“I view AI as more likely to lower than to raise net existential risks.”
His reasoning was comparative: the world already faces serious dangers, and stronger science could improve our defenses. My summary views on AI existential risk.
Tabarrok’s later writing places more weight on specific vulnerabilities. On April 8, 2026, he described:
“the worrying combination that very powerful AI’s are very vulnerable.”
He was discussing cybersecurity capabilities alongside agents’ susceptibility to manipulation. AI Risks.
On September 17, 2026, he sharpened the institutional objection to assuming that beneficial science will automatically offset dangerous capabilities:
“But faster science does not automatically mean faster defense.”
This can be read as a qualification of Cowen’s earlier optimism: defensive discoveries must pass through institutions that may move slowly. It also applies Cowen’s own bottleneck logic to safety. Pandemic Preparation is AI Safety.
Cowen nevertheless supports safeguards. In August 2026, he proposed government-overseen, industry-led safety audits. In September, he opposed restrictions on recursive improvement as impractical to enforce internationally. His position is therefore selective regulation combined with continued development. See his August 27 proposal and September 22 critique.
The September 2026 exchange about AI leaders
On September 16, 2026, Tabarrok rejected the claim that executives’ safety warnings were merely marketing or regulatory capture:
“Amodei actually believes what he’s saying.”
He did not thereby establish that the warnings or proposed policies were correct. His argument concerned sincerity and incentives. What Regulatory Capture Actually Looks Like.
Cowen replied the next day:
“I agree with Alex that the standard model of regulatory capture does not apply here”
But he emphasized competition for power: each executive sincerely thinks their own company should win. For Cowen, that complicates treating their warnings as disinterested policy advice. They agree that concern is sincere; they differ over which incentives best explain behavior. The correct model of AI CEO behavior, September 17, 2026.
Consciousness and Tabarrok’s warning about infant pain
On March 17, 2025, Tabarrok’s What Did We Learn From Torturing Babies? drew a moral lesson from medicine’s historical dismissal of infant pain. He described how theories about immature brains allowed physicians to discount babies’ observable distress and perform procedures without adequate anesthesia. His warning explicitly extended to judgments about animals and AI:
“If we must err, let us err on the side of compassion.”
Tabarrok’s position is stronger than mere openness to AI consciousness: he argues for moral caution under uncertainty. The analogy does not establish that AI suffers. It challenges confidence that a theory ruling out suffering is sufficient grounds to disregard possible evidence of it.
On October 14, 2025, he went further in his own commentary following an essay by Jack Clark:
“these systems are becoming self-aware”
He distinguished self-awareness from sentience, while warning against confidently dismissing the latter. His link accompanying that warning points back to the infant-pain essay, making the connection explicit. We Turned the Light On—and the AI Looked Back.
Cowen’s position is much more categorical. On August 31, 2026, he wrote:
“I am very much opposed to the view that the AIs are sentient, or might be sentient.”
He treats AI sentience as a category error, although he accepts that human-like descriptions can sometimes help predict AI behavior. Anthropomorphizing AI?
The disagreement concerns both what AI might experience and how to act when we cannot confidently know. Tabarrok’s historical analogy places greater weight on the moral cost of mistakenly denying consciousness; Cowen expresses much greater confidence that sentience is the wrong category to apply. These are their philosophical assessments, not established findings about AI consciousness.
Is “Who’s on First?” funny?
Well, no, it is not funny, it would be too easy to relieve the dramatic tension by having Abbott explain the actual situation to Costello. One is not wrong to call the whole thing stupid.
Yet there is another reading of the skit which stands at least some chance of being funny, though it is not funny either.
You will note that Louis Costello was an Italian-American and son of an immigrant, and he had the obvious class mannerisms of such a stereotype. Bud Abbott was half Jewish and I believe half some mainstream ethnicity. He is a stand-in for the establishment, part of which was Jewish and highly commercial. You can read the skit as a commentary on how the establishment rips off the “less tutored” immigrants and refuses to apologize for that or even to explain it. The establishment simply keeps on talking rings around the lower-class immigrant, whether or not those words make sense. The immigrant has no real recourse, as he is less articulate and is also less in control and can only play the role of boob. In essence, Abbott, by not telling Costello the real names of the players, is not letting the ethnic assimilate into that most American of pasttimes, namely baseball.
Note how Costello admits, early in the skit, that he is the one with the funny name (Sebastian Dinwitty in the skit, likely a take-off on “dimwit”). And Abbott, by speaking of the players as being named Who, What, and “I don’t know,” is expressing his frustration with an America that does not sound or look the same any more. Abbott is in essence saying “Hey, what is this? I was not expecting Ted Kluszewski in my country!” He is throwing the growing presence of immigrants in the country back in the face of the ethnic and then stonewalling it.
In the skit, Abbott has the name of “Mr. Broadhurst,” very reminiscent of the establishment.
The skit does show we had an America too obsessed with names, and to no fruitful purpose. It is no accident that in addition to the “hames” for all the baseball players, we are given names for the skit characters as well, even though that might appear not necessary for the unfolding of the dialogue as it usually is understood.
Racist is not the right word, but the skit plays on ethnic prejudices in a manner which one can rightfully find somewhat uncomfortable. The back and forth dynamic reflects the prejudices of American life, though the presenters mirror and amplify those dynamics rather than merely critiquing them. And (again) while the skit is not funny, this interpretation at least opens a door to some people finding it funny.
When Larry David and Seinfeld note they were influenced by Abbott and Costello, they (especially LD) sometimes deploy ethnic stereotypes in a similar manner.
Of course I, being from northern New Jersey, would happen upon this interpretation of Abbott and Costello.
By the way, Costello grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. Abbott was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and he grew up in Coney Island. I wonder if they thought the skit was funny.
Elizabeth Holmes, in the recent You Can See Everything Movie, was right to say she did not understand the skit. She grew up in WDC until age nine and then Houston, plus she was born too late. Furthermore, she is used to a world where you hire a guy named “Hu,” right?
The Panic Patrol
The Panic Patrol, a division of the department of future corrections, reminds us of past panics. Here’s one case in point I wasn’t aware of:
Facts about breastfeeding
We produce a numerical estimate of the value of unpaid breastfeeding relative to national income spanning five centuries and integrating historical and bioarchaeological data. The relative economic contribution of maternal nursing was greater in the distant past than in recent history, rivaling regionally significant industries such as pottery, glassmaking, and even the historical public sector. It was likely the largest source of human capital investment in early modern England, supporting the physical and cognitive development of the workforce. Finally, we show that breastfeeding rates probably fell as incomes rose, challenging the Malthusian assumption that higher income correlates with lower mortality.
That is from a recent paper by Louis Henderson and Jane Humphries. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
How Long Do Wealth Shocks Persist? Less Than Three Generations in England, 1700–2026
What happens across generations to wealth shocks? Do they endure and even magnify, or do they dissipate? By implication, how much modern wealth is attributable to events before 1900? This paper uses random shocks to family size in England before 1880 that created wealth shocks for the children to measure the persistence of wealth shocks. Fertility in England before 1880 was a biological lottery. For richer families, family size strongly influenced child wealth. This paper finds that such biology-induced wealth shocks had no impact on descendant wealth by three generations later. Since wealth itself persisted across more than five generations this implies that, in the long run, wealth mainly derives from sources other than inherited wealth. The observed link between nineteenth century and modern wealth does not lie in wealth transfers alone. Wealth persisted because of the familial inheritance of behaviors associated with wealth accumulation and retention.
That is from a recent paper by Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
*This Beautiful Country*
The author is Edward Cutler and the subtitle is How Italy’s Nature Shaped its Culture and Civilisation. This is an excellent book on how “the Italy you know” has been shaped by its natural environment, such as its mountains, rivers, geology, and so on. Ever wondered why Sardinia is different? The book is good at sticking to specifics. Excerpt:
This extraordinary overlap has made Italy the continent’s botanical crossroads and one of its greatest arboreal sanctuaries. Within Europe, few countries host such a variety of native trees: at least 140 species, more than almost anywhere west of the Balkans. Some, like the Sicilian fir, Lobel’s maple and the Etna birch, are totally unique. The structure of Italy’s forests is equally diverse — dense, high-altitude canopies, open oak pastures, cork scrub and coastal maquis, each shaped by centuries of disturbance and renewal. This is the legacy of a land that sreved first as Europe’s refuge during the Ice Ages and later as its great corridor of return, where northern, eastern and African floras met and mingled in perpetual exchange.
Recommended to all those with an interest in Italy.
The archaeology tranche of Emergent Ventures
- Björn Öste is building Arkhub, an AI-powered platform that analyzes remote-sensing and other archaeological data to identify potential ancient sites in the Amazon and enable further investigation by citizen scientists.
- J. Cameron Monroe is leading the Allada Regional Archaeology Project, using lidar, remote sensing, and archaeological fieldwork to reconstruct the historical landscape of the Kingdom of Allada and strengthen cultural heritage preservation in Benin.
Previously reported grantees include:
- Benjamin Arbuckle is combining archaeology and ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct entire ecosystems of ancient cities, with the goal of understanding how human societies can thrive in balance with their environments.
- Jesse Casana, an archaeology professor at Dartmouth, is developing drone-based radar imaging methods to detect and map archaeological sites buried beneath desert sands. His work combines advanced remote-sensing technologies with efforts to preserve endangered cultural landscapes.
- Leila Character is developing drone-based imaging and AI tools to detect hidden archaeological sites, making discovery faster, cheaper, and more accessible to researchers worldwide.
- Bryce Hoenigman is developing an AI tool to help date ancient cuneiform tablets by analyzing how written symbols evolved over time, with the goal of making archaeological research faster and more accurate.
With thanks to Yonatan Ben Shimon for his generosity in support of this. We do still have funds remaining in this tranche…
My excellent Conversation with Liaquat Ahamed
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
They start with that puzzle before moving through Gladstone’s startlingly self-interested bet on Egyptian bonds, Bismarck’s role in destroying bimetallism and deflating the world economy for two decades, whether a global silver or symmetallic standard could have worked, Britain’s fateful decision to re-peg the pound to gold in 1926, Hjalmar Schacht’s transformation from the economist who stabilized Weimar’s currency to opportunist collaborator with the Nazi regime, Montagu Norman’s spiritualist beliefs, why the 1920s produced such a creative cultural moment, lessons from the IMF on Ireland’s housing bubble and Pakistan’s two dozen bailouts, what went wrong in the eurozone crisis, Britain’s baffling modern stagnation, and finally to his own restless career — from the World Bank to a failed Iraq film to Ismaili Islam’s uniquely progress-oriented leadership structure, and what he wants to write next.
We open thus:
COWEN: I have a general question about how your work fits together. Your book Lords of Finance, it convinced me that financial crises really matter, and your new book, 1873, almost convinced me that financial crises don’t really matter, because the world just keeps on growing. What makes the difference for when, historically speaking, crises will really matter?
AHAMED: I think the first book, Lords of Finance, was about the financial crisis that really plunged the world into a Great Depression. The second, 1873, is about a crisis that didn’t actually plunge the world into a terrible great depression, but what it did was cause a sequence of effects throughout the world which damaged the political economy of the world for the next 20 years. A better title would have been The First Great Deflation.
COWEN: We’re supposed to believe that deflation is bad, nominal wages are sticky. This was a pretty slow deflation, but by one measure, the major world economies are growing 2.5 percent over the next 20 years from 1873 onwards. How did we adjust so well to this?
AHAMED: Because prices were flexible. Nominal wages went down. I think the distributional consequences and the political impact of those distributional consequences were much more damaging than the pure economic consequences.
COWEN: In the 1920s, and a bit afterwards, of course, you could say politics goes crazy in many countries, most of all in Europe. After 1873, would you say politics went crazy, or it just continued along its 19th-century path?
AHAMED: No, I don’t think it went crazy, but it wasn’t a happy time politically—it’s populism in the United States, the resurgence of protectionism in Europe, the retreat from liberal ideas, the revival of imperialism by Britain when it invaded Egypt. Those were not happy things that happened.
And this:
COWEN: Now, I know you’re listed as non-practicing, but I’m quite curious about Ismaili Muslims and why they seem to be so much more pro-progress, on average, than other parts of the Muslim world. Do you have a view on this?
AHAMED: Yes, very much so, because of our leadership. We Ismailis believe in the leadership of a man, the Aga Khan. We believe he’s the direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and he sets the agenda for the whole community. Many, in the old days, people believed he was divine or he had divine spirit. I don’t think many people believe that anymore, but he’s invested with so much moral authority that if he says, move to Africa, big chunks of the community will do that. He has charted an incredibly enlightened direction for the community. It’s not very large. There are maybe two or three million Ismailis in the world.
COWEN: You think it’s that the Imam is nonhidden that’s useful because he’s a source of ongoing change?
AHAMED: Yes. That was the whole rationale for Shiism.
Interesting and substantive throughout, recommended.
*Plunder: The Last of the War in Europe, 1945*
By Max Hastings, an excellent book, I benefited from every page. One recurring theme is simply how hard the Germans fought on the way down, and how unusual that behavior was. Here is one interesting passage of many:
In World War I, 150 German soldiers were sentenced to death for serious crimes, of which a mere forty-eight were executed. In World War II, thirty thousand death sentences were decreed by military courts, of which two-thirds were carried out, in addition to many more that took place without any judicial proceeding. By contrast the British executed forty men, the French 103, the Americans 146, almost all the condemned Allied soldiers having committed capital crimes as defined in civil law, rather than being sentenced for dereliction of military duty. Meanwhile the Japanese executed 22,253 of their own men, and the Russians at least 150,000, possibly as many as 300,000.
As I like to say, you can never read too many books about WWII.
*Lost Worlds*
The author is Patrick Wyman, and the subtitle is How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World. An excellent book, it is a survey of (mostly) pre-Sumerian times, what we know about them, and how we have learned a lot lately. It is easy to read, yet the author properly stresses the complexity of the topic, for instance we often find agricultural and non-agricultural societies intermingling with each other and in close contact, in those cases the lines cannot be so easily drawn. Excerpt:
This was not the case for the copper axe Ötzi carried, a rare and precious object in an era when metalworking was still a new technology. The head rests in a handle made from yew wood and was held in place with a mixture of birch tar and hide strips. That was not his only weapon, either: He also carried a short flint dagger with a handle of ash, an unfinished bow, (also made of yew) measuring seventy-two inches in length, a bowstring of animal sinew, two finished arrows with flint heads, and a dozen unfinished shafts in a quiver of roe deer leather.
Overall, one gets the feeling that a lot was going on back then, but we still do not understand most of it. The author is aware of this, but avoids undue speculation. Recommended, will make my best of the year non-fiction list.
What should I ask Fuchsia Dunlop?
Yes I will be doing a fourth (!) Conversation with her, based in part on her forthcoming book Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavors. I am sure it is excellent, and will read it very soon. Her works are not just great cookbooks, they are among the best books period.
Here are my previous CWTs with Fuchsia. So what should I ask?
How and why did the Victorians succeed?
From Samuel Hughes, in Works in Progress:
The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.
Here is some further detail:
Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years in a ‘preparatory school’ before passing on to a ‘public school’ (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, is a kind of elite private school). There was a hierarchy of public schools, with the nine ‘Clarendon schools’ at the top, and just one, Eton College, clearly at the apex. About 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians.
Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire.
Nor did the Victorians wake up early in the morning. Recommended, there is much more at the link, though the answer to the question remains somewhat of a mystery to me.
The Great Accretion and the Great Depression
A very old idea, returning with a vengeance:
The Second Industrial Revolution sparked a wave of new products and industrial processes, fueling an optimistic Roaring Twenties. But did excitement about technological progress contribute to an over accumulation of investment, despite a slowdown in new product development and satiated demand during the 1920s? And, was this over investment worsened by continuous process innovation? Could these factors have played a role in triggering the Great Depression? To explore these questions, a macroeconomic model that incorporates both process and product innovation is proposed. Proof-of-concept simulations are performed to assess whether these factors can help explain the Great Depression. The answer is yes.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by
The Greg Clark Symposium
Earlier I wrote “Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century.” Thus, the symposium in Econ Journal Watch on Clark’s new but perhaps not forthcoming book is very welcome. The symposium includes serious critics, most notably Stuhler and Benning, but I suspect even the critics would agree with Arden and Plomin who write:
We agree wholeheartedly with Clark’s overall message that genetics accounts for outcomes long assumed to be due to nurture. Like other books in his trilogy, Clark marshals evidence from diverse sources to support his argument.
The data reach in this book—1600–2026—is jaw-dropping. Clark (and his colleague Neil Cummins) turned to wedding-register marks, probate courts, Huguenot wills, Oxbridge matriculation rolls, Sandhurst cadet lists, Wedgwood servants, and the Guild of One-Name Studies, to name a few. These data are imaginative, arresting, and inspiring. The analyses conducted, given the manifest complexities of harmonising across data types, time, and place, are impressive.
…This audacious scholarly book properly lights a fire under important questions. We look forward to following the work, its critics, and its rebuttals. It’s a terrific scientific contribution; because it is so thoroughly interdisciplinary, it will enrich and enliven the conversation about social status, its causes, and malleability.
One thing I am struck with from the critics (not just those in the symposium) is that most acknowledge that twin and adoption studies have badly undermined the claim that parental investments are big determinants of adult ability and earnings. The critics are correct that more elaborate environmental models can reproduce genetic-looking correlations but keeping an environmental explanation alive is not the same as vindicating the explanation people originally believed. Clark and many others have pushed the debate far into new territory.
There is also a basic asymmetry between the competing explanations. Genetics supplies independently established inheritance rules. When an environmental model reproduces the same patterns by choosing transmission rules precisely because they mimic genetic inheritance, it is accommodating the evidence, not independently predicting it. True, Clark also requires some free parameter choices, but he is clear that these can and need to be independently estimated.
The kinds of parental effects being demonstrated also matter. The nurture effects the environmentalists point to often seem to be for optional, steerable, or transferable choices than for more fundamental abilities, that is, changing what a child chooses to do with a given set of abilities, versus changing those abilities. Parents, for example, have more influence over religious identification than over religiosity, more influence over wealth than income, more influence over educational attainment than IQ.
The genetic arguments in the book draw the most criticism and yet the book has much else offer as Clark notes. For example:
Social status is inherited as strongly as height. Even relatives as distant as nine generations apart, 270 years, still show significant correlation in social status.
That is a very striking finding–especially given the intervening industrial revolution, multiple wars, huge changes in social mores etc.–but if it stands, it does so independent of the genetic explanation.
The fact that this monumental and challenging book–right or wrong–cannot find a major academic publisher is an intellectual scandal. The editors at Princeton University Press and the University of Chicago Press should be ashamed.
Addendum: See previous MR posts on Clark including Tyler’s Conversation.
What should I ask Tom Griffiths?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Looking at Wikipedia:
Thomas L. Griffiths (born c. 1978) is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, was named one of the “Best Books of 2016” by MIT Technology Review…
Griffiths released The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind in 2026. Siobhan Roberts describes it as “a rigorous and captivating account of how cognition can be modeled via three mathematical frameworks: logic, artificial neural networks (“mathematical systems that emulate the operation of the brain”) and probability theory.”
Here is his research page, here is his new book on Amazon, I thought the book was excellent.
So what should I ask him?