Brooks's 1986 predecessor memo to "Intelligence Without Representation" cites Dreyfus twice by name and frames its entire argument as a rebuttal to him

"Achieving Artificial Intelligence through Building Robots" (A.I. Memo 899, MIT AI Laboratory, May 1986) is Rodney Brooks's own predecessor draft of "Intelligence Without Representation," the paper the vault already confirmed carries no Dreyfus citation in its 1991 published form (claim-brooks-1991-does-not-cite-dreyfus). The 1986 memo does cite him. Its opening paragraph names Dreyfus and frames the memo's entire technical argument as an answer to his thesis that human-level intelligence requires "the totality of practices which make up the human way of being in the world." The reference list carries two entries: Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do (1972) and "Why Computers May Never Think Like People" (Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Technology Review, January 1986).

This is a documented, primary-source, on-the-record engagement — Brooks naming Dreyfus, citing two of his works, and building his own project explicitly against Dreyfus's position — that predates and complicates the "our work was not so inspired... purely engineering considerations" disclaimer of the published 1991 paper (claim-brooks-1991-disclaims-heideggerian-inspiration). The disclaimer is true of the published text; it is not true of the argument's origin. It is one of three episodes (with claim-brooks-dropped-dreyfus-citation-after-reviewer-criticism and claim-brooks-2002-book-credits-dreyfus-per-dreyfus-2007-quote) behind the wider synthesis at claim-brooks-dreyfus-engagement-outside-iwr-runs-toward-rebuttal, and it answers question-brooks-dreyfus-secondary-literature-reception-lineage.