be confused with glib technological glitz and surreal futuristic promises.
Not that GEB had those either, but many people seemed to see something
vaguely along those lines in it, whereas there's nothing of that sort to latch
onto, in LeTbM. In fact, some might see it almost as technology-bashing, in
that I take many artificial-intelligence researchers and machine-translation
developers to task for wildly exaggerated claims. I am not an enemy of these
fields, but I am against vast oversimplifications and underestimations of the
challenges that they represent, for in the end, that amounts to a vast
underestimation of the human spirit, for which I have the deepest respect.
Anyone who has read GEB with any care should have seen this same
"backward-looking" flavor permeating the book, perhaps most explicitly so
in the key section ''Ten Questions and Speculations" (pp. 676-680), which is
a very romantic way of looking at the depth of the human spirit. Although
my prediction about chess-playing programs put forth there turned out to
be embarrassingly wrong (as the world saw with Deep Blue versus Kasparov
in 1997), those few pages nonetheless express a set of philosophical beliefs
to which I am still committed in the sU'ongest sense.
To Tamper, or to Leave Pristine?
Given that I was quite wrong in a prediction made twenty years ago, why not
rewrite the "Ten Questions and Speculations" section, updating it and
talking about how I feel in light of Deep Blue? Well, of course, this brings
up a much larger issue: that of revising the 1979 book from top to bottom,
and coming out with a spanking new 1999 edition of GEB. What might
militate for, and what might militate against, undertaking such a project?
I don't deny that some delightful, if small, improvements were made in
the translated versions. For example, my magistrally Bach-savvy friend
Bernie Greenberg informed me that the "BACH goblet" I had invented out
of whole cloth in my dialogue "Contracrostipunctus" actually exists! The
real goblet is not (as in my dialogue) a piece of glass blown by Bach, but
rather a gift from one of his prize st.udents; nonetheless, its key feature -
that of having the melody "BACH" etched into the glass itself - is just as I
said in the dialogue! This was such an amazing coincidence that I rewrote
the dialogue for the French version to reflect the real goblet's existence, and
insisted on having a photograph of the BACH goblet in the French GEB.
Another delicious touch in the French GEB was the replacement of the
very formal, character-less photo of Godel by a far more engaging snapshot
in which he's in a spiffy white suit and is strolling with some old codger in a
forest. The latter, decked out in a Hoppy hat and baggy pants held up by
gawky suspenders, looks every inch the quintessential rube, so I rewrote the
caption as Kurt COdel avec un paysan non identifie ("Kurt Godel with unknown
peasant"). But as anyone who has lived in the twentieth century can see in a
split second, the paysan non identifie is none other than A. Einstein.
Why not, then, incorporate those amusing changes into a revised
edition in English? On a more substantial level, why not talk a bit about theP-22 Twentieth-anniversary Preface