I agree. There's a lot of fascinating essay-form stuff on EDGE, fortunately. Check out Jaron Lanier's "Half a Manifesto," for example.

The videos might give you a better notion of who you're dealing with, of course.

I sat at the same banquet table as Minsky a few years back. He couldn't reach the butter dish so he threaded together a bunch forks into a long reach-out-and-snag-a-butter-ball tool.

Which was all cool and fun to watch, but it would have been less work for him to ask for someone to pass the plate . . .

I don't find the video format very appropriate for deep topics like this. It makes more sense to let these people sit down and write a page or two summarizing these thoughts so that we can consider them at length. They can organize their thoughts better that way, too, instead of rambling.