Xref: utzoo comp.society.futures:398 comp.ai:1501 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!necntc!linus!philabs!ttidca!hollombe From: hollombe@ttidca.TTI.COM (The Polymath) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures,comp.ai Subject: Re: The future of AI [was Re: Time Magazine -- Computers of the Future] Message-ID: <2208@ttidca.TTI.COM> Date: 31 Mar 88 20:02:22 GMT References: <8803270154.AA08607@bu-cs.bu.edu> <962@daisy.UUCP> Reply-To: hollombe@ttidcb.tti.com (The Polymath) Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica Lines: 68 In article <962@daisy.UUCP> klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee) writes: >What do people think of the PRACTICAL future of artificial intelligence? My empoloyers just sponsored a week-long in-house series of seminars, films, vendor presentations and demonstrations of expert systems technology. I attended all of it, so I think I can reasonably respond to this. Apparently, the expert systems/knowledge engineering branch of so called AI (of which, more later) has made great strides in the last few years. There are many (some vendors claim thousands) of expert system based commercial applications running in large and small corporations all over the country. In the past week we saw presentations by Gold Hill Computers (GOLDWORKS), Aion Corp. (ADS), Texas Instruments (Personal Consultant Plus) and Neuron Data (Nexpert Object). The presentations were impressive, even taking into account their sales nature. None of the vendors is in any financial trouble, to say the least. All claimed many delivered, working systems. A speaker from DEC explained that their Vax configurator systems couldn't have been developed without an expert system (they tried and failed) and is now one of the oldest and most famous expert systems running. It was pointed out by some of the speakers that companies using expert systems tend to keep a low profile about it. They consider their systems as company secrets, proprietary information that gives them an edge in their market. Personal Impressions: The single greatest advantage of expert systems seems to be their rapid prototyping capability. They can produce a working system in days or weeks that would require months or years, if it could be done at all, with conventional languages. That system can subsequently be modified very easily and rapidly to meet changing conditions or include new rules as they're discovered. Once a given algorithm has stabilized over time, it can be re-written in a more conventional language, but still accessed by the expert system. The point being that the algorithm may never have been determined at all but for the adaptable rapid prototyping environment. (The DEC Vax configurator, mentioned above, is an example of this. Much of it, but not all, has been converted to conventional languages). As for expense, prices of systems vary widely, but are coming down. TI offers a board with a LISP mainframe-on-a-chip (their term) that will turn a MAC-II into a LISP machine for as little as $7500. Other systems went as high as an order of magnitude over that. I personally think these won't really take off 'til the price drops another order of magnitude to put them in the hands of the average home hacker. Over all, I'd have to say that expert systems, at least, are alive and well with a bright future ahead of them. About Artificial Intelligence: I maintain this is a contradiction in terms, and likely to be so for the forseeable future. If we take "intelligence" to mean more than expert knowledge of a very narrow domain there's nothing in existence that can equal the performance of any mammal, let alone a human being. We're just begining to explore the types of machine architectures whose great^n- grandchildren might, someday, be able to support something approaching true AI. I'll be quite amazed to see it in my lifetime (but the world has amazed me before (-: ). -- The Polymath (aka: Jerry Hollombe, hollombe@TTI.COM) Illegitimati Nil Citicorp(+)TTI Carborundum 3100 Ocean Park Blvd. (213) 452-9191, x2483 Santa Monica, CA 90405 {csun|philabs|psivax|trwrb}!ttidca!hollombe