I really did mean consider turning the engine of as a possibility before aiming for something to crash into. i.e. after going into neutral, trying the brakes etc. But before ringing the police ;) Also, you could turn the engine off and on again. Wouldn't have helped me, but then my car didn't even know what a computer was. A quick reboot of the car's computers might have sorted it.

Seeing as you're sitting calmly at a computer and you still didn't consider turning the damn engine off as a possibility before aiming for something to crash into, it kind of begs the question as to why you think people panicking in a runaway car at 100 mph would be more cogent than they were. I once had my car start to accelerate without my foot on the pedal (due to a build up of grease around the wire next to the engine), where I tried clearing the problem by hitting the accelerator a few times (which made it much worse), before going out of gear (hitting about 7000 revs and heading towards damaging the engine), then finally resolving it by turning the engine off and coasting to a stop without power steering. Believe me, you panic like f*ck and if I hadn't been on a quiet, straight country road I could have been in a heap of trouble. Still, having enough time to call the police, I agree they weren't the smartest tools in the box.

We could begin to have a dialogue by placing a little trust in one another to quote things we know rather than things we've heard or swear we heard during some conversation some time ago. For that I'll retract my kitten statement. It was from a conversation long ago, I didn't read whatever paper was quoted then and I certainly can't find it now so I'll drop it and hope you can forgive the irrelevancy of my bringing it up in the first place. Secondly, I'm not employed in the scientific establishment and I'm hoping this doesn't alter your perception of my arguments. I have a meagre degree in artificial intelligence and a masters in artificial life, so my background is reasonable academically. I am also currently employed as an AI programmer in the games industry, so my professional background is also reasonably well oriented. The problem with trust on experimental evidence is one where only your own subjective viewpoint upon reading the papers might make you believe they have some worth. So, look here for Ezequiel's paper http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ezequiel/homeo.ps It heavily suggests that neuron level internal, local stability (with local Hebbian-like adaptation) begets external, behavioural stability. This is a first point in suggesting that how transistor level mechanisms work has a fundamental effect on large scale (behavioural) processes. I'm not trying to suggest that perspective of behaviour isn't useful at any level between neuronal and large scale social, but that neuronal level experimentation is still useful in gross understanding of the process of intelligence.