To put some of this into starker contrast.. 40 years, 200 million dollars, and broken promises is the cost burned on something besides ML? Wait isn't the current approach burning that kind of cash in a weekend, and aren't we proudly backdating deep-learning to ~1960 every time someone calls it "new"? Is a huge volume of inscrutable weights, with unknown sources, generated at huge costs, really "better" than closed-source in terms of transparency? Are we not very busy building agents and critics very much like Minky's society of mind while we shake our heads and say he was wrong?
This write-up also appears to me as if it were kind of punching down. A "hostile assessment" in an "obituary" is certainly easy in hindsight, especially if business is booming in your (currently very popular) neighborhood. If you didn't want to punch down, if you really want to go on record as saying logic/search are completely dead-ended and AGI won't ever touch the stuff.. it would probably look more like critiquing symbolica.ai, saying that nothing like scallop-lang / pyreason will ever find any use-cases, etc.
Very disappointing as otherwise your comment is insightful and on point.
I'm not a fan of weaponizing AI, and I think that's what we're talking about. Either it was a glorified CMS, in which case the presentation as AI was dishonest and cynical. Or it really was AI, in which case it was weaponized research.
If we're talking about graves, then it might be good to also consider all of the ones that you're not mentioning, the ones presumably resulting from the details about where the money came from. How many? How many of those deserved it and how many were bad inferences? I guess we'll never know.