I came across this utterly fascinating, four-year-old interview with Carver Mead in a weblog calling itself Laputan Logic, of all things. The "dark age" he refers to is the last seventy years...
I last came across Mead at the very first International Conference on Neural Networks in San Diego in 1988. His iconoclastic embrace of neural networks, which were then themselves just emerging from a twenty-year "dark age" brought on by their having been declared heresy at the hands of orthodox AI Perceptron critics like Minsky and his ilk, had impressed me at the time...