[dragonwriter]

> One could hope that starting with reasoning instead of trying to get it "emerge" would do a better job.

We did AI starting with reasoning (directly implementing rules of propositional logic) first, it is called expert systems.

It works very well for some things, but after some efforts to expand it with things like fuzzy logic it became pretty much accepted that we'd reached its limit.

You could hope that it would work better, but...