Yep I've seen his talk. It's quite fascinating. However, what you're talking about is a learning algorithm, which does not necessarily equate with intelligence. OpenCyc would be the best example that illustrates my point. Edit: on second thought, you probably meant to say that given such a general purpose learning algorithm, and a suitable environment, the algorithm would in time learn enough to produce intelligence of some kind (of what kind, I'm not sure) that's capable of thinking. In that case, I agree with you, and I'll have to revise my opinion, but I'm still not sure if it qualifies as emergent phenomena from simple rules. An analogy would be Google's search algorithm running on huge amounts of data. Would you call the search results an emerging phenomena from simple rules?