Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!SAIL.STANFORD.EDU!JMC
From: JMC@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (John McCarthy)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Revenge at last!
Message-ID: <8804132057.AA22260@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 7 Apr 88 06:41:00 GMT
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In article <962@daisy.UUCP> klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee) writes:
>
>Is AI just too expensive and too complicated for practical use?  I
>spent 3 years in the field and I'm beginning to think the answer is
>mostly yes.  In my opinion, all working AI programs are either toys or
>could have been developed much more cheaply using conventional
>techniques.

At last I get to use a retort that I thought of a half hour too late
almost 30 years ago.  After one of my first public lectures on LISP
in about 1960 in which I gave examples of algebraic computations,
someone in the back of the audience, I think his name might have
been Carl Peterson, said scornfully, "I could easily have programmed all
that in assembly language".  The retort should have been, "Well then,
why didn't you?"