It's like asking Hawkins about black holes. These people have huge careers that are not limited to what every digger knows about them. For one thing, his most recent work - Elephant - is a lot more about production software then about AI, and for another they must be pretty bored to answer the same "what is consciousness" and "does light really disappear in a black hole" questions.

Also forgive me about wanting to be a better programmer, especially here on hacker news. What was I thinking.

That is a fair point. But I think Hawkins can probably tell us more interesting things about black holes than about, say, 101 tricks for quickly simplifying a differential equation. If there's a question that nobody but McCarthy could answer satisfactorily, McCarthy is the one to ask.

That was the reason for my original post. I think McCarthy can tell us a lot about production software too, probably a lot more then most. It's just nobody asks him, and instead we get the same answers we can find in his last 10 interviews.

I wouldn't mind AI questions too, if only they were a bit more original.