Courtesy Jason Perry:
Gepetto (Tom) builds Pinocchio. Pinocchio learns to turn on light switches with his butt, etc. Gepetto is justifiably proud.
Then Pinocchio tries to go out into the real world. Someone asks him to bring an orange and he fouls it up. Winds up being ridiculed (by Terry Winograd) -- he's not a real boy (intelligent agent) because he'll never have real aboutness. Pinocchio weeps bitterly.
So Pinocchio launches out on a quest to gain aboutness. Then he'll be a 'real' intelligent agent.
First he tries to get really good at recognizing quarters. He gets a job as a vending machine. He's sure that if he can distinguish real quarters without error, he will have real aboutness. He makes a mistake on a Balboa quarter and is fired.
Next, he finds a penny and latches onto it. He's sure he can be 'about' this penny if he gives it his full devotion. He does everything to save the lucky penny, becoming a kind of survival machine for the penny. Then the inevitable accident happens and he loses the penny. Dejected, Pinocchio concludes he was never really 'about' the penny in the first place.
Then he tries to have aboutness by keeping track of everything, keeping a cosmic registry of something. The problem is, every time he adds one to the cosmic registry, his nose grows.
Multiple endings follow:
ENDING 1: Fairy Godfather Philip Agre comes and grants Pinocchio deictic representation. Fairy Godmother Iris comes and shows Pinocchio how to baptize his terms.
ENDING 2: Glenda the good witch shows up and tells him he had aboutness all along, because of his pure heart that was committed to social grounding of his concepts. Flashback to all the things Pinocchio did that showed how socially grounded he was.
TWILIGHT ZONE ENDING: Rod Serling shows up and tells Pinocchio that he's really just a vehicle for preserving the ideas covered in a graduate AI seminar.