My interest in AI emerged from a personal "break boundary" when I quit a long and undistinguished career in the oxymoronic world of military and government intelligence, and got involved in computers as managing editor of a population journal in Hawaii. A subsequent Master's in the information and communication sciences from Ball State U., and a short-lived PhD stint at Michigan State both led me first towards the foggy notion that networked computers would become important and then to the even dafter idea that this network might get smart. Smarter than us.

Founding what has become Michigan's biggest Internet Service provider cleared the fog from the first notion. It's time to peer into the mist of the second.

Please join me often to share in the digging into the questions: IS the evolution of Machina sapiens possible, and if so when, how, and--arguably most important of all--with what consequences for a species used to top billing?

We'll provide links to related Internet sites (and I do mean we--you and me together). We'll make especial use of the opportunities for cross-fertilization afforded by our neighbors in other areas of the Web. Not just the science and technology areas but also the social, psychological, and religious areas as well.

We (and again, I'll seek your help) will seek input from some of the leading luminaries in the various fields that contribute to our own. I'm thinking of AI gurus in the business world as well as academia, of cognitive scientists, physicists, neurophysiologists, chaoticists, evolutionists and--what the heck--creationists. We'll get them to tell us today the insights to be published in their books in three years' time. And we'll ask the companies that are making this stuff happen to let us know where they plan on taking us tomorrow.

We won't be treading directly on our neighbors' turf. Other Web sites will take up the programming, networking, hardware, software, and general scientific and humanistic areas of inquiry that provide the foundations for our own edifice. Technobabble and math will be found in the links and maybe in some of the discussions, but by and large we'll try to make our area understandable by and interesting to any reasonably literate person (or machine...). 

And finally, we'll strive to maintain a balance between having fun and getting morbidly serious. Carbon-based life is too short to waste on the alternative.