Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!str From: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Me and Karl Kluge (no flames, no insults, no abuse) Message-ID: <1312@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Date: 1 Jun 88 14:30:38 GMT Article-I.D.: crete.1312 References: <1792@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Reply-To: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland Lines: 81 In article <1792@pt.cs.cmu.edu> kck@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge) writes: >> Because so little of our effective knowledge is formalised, we learn >> in social contexts, not from books. I presume AI is full of relative >> loners who have learnt more of what they publicly interact with from >> books rather than from people. > >You presume an awful lot. Comments like that show the intellectual level >of your critique of AI. I also presume that comparative attitudes to book and social knowledge are a measurable, and probably fairly stable, feature of someone's make up. It would be intriguing to test the hypothesis that AI researchers place more faith in the ability of text (including programs) to capture social reality than other academic groups. Now, does this still have no intellectual respectability? > >Well, what kind of AI research are you looking to judge? If you're looking >at something like SOAR or ACT*, which claim to be computational models of >human intelligence, then comparisons of the performance of the architecture >with data on human performance in given task domains can be (and are) made. You obviously have missed my comments about work by John Anderson and other psychological research. If AI were all conducted this way, there would be less to object about. >If you are looking at research which attempts to perform tasks we usually >think of as requiring "intelligence", such as image understanding, without >claiming to be a model of human performance of the task, then one can ask >to what extent does the work capture the underlying structure of the task? >how does the approach scale? how robust is it? and any of a number of other >questions. OK then. Point to an AI text book that covers Task Analysis? Point to work other than SOAR and ACT* where the Task Domain has been formally studied before the computer implementation? My objection to much work in AI is that there has been NO proper study of the tasks which the program attempts to simulate. Vision research generally has very good psychophysical underpinnings, and I accept that my criticisms do not apply to this area either. To supply one example, note how the research on how experts explain came AFTER the dismal failure of rule traces in expert systems to be accepted as explanation. See Alison Kidd's work on the unwarranted assumptions behind much (early?) expert systems work. One reason I did not pursue a PhD in AI was that one potential supervisor told me that I didn't have to do any empirical work before designing a system, indeed I was strongly encouraged NOT to do any empirical studies first. I couldn't believe my ears. How the hell can you model what you've never studied? Fiction. >Mr. Cockton, it is more than a little arrogant to assume that anyone who >disagrees with you is some sort of unread, unwashed social misfit When did I mention hygiene? On "unread", this a trivial charge to prove, just read through the references in AAAI and IJCAI. AI researchers are not reading what educational researchers are reading, something which I can't understand, as they are both studying the same thing. Finally, anyone who is programming a lot of the time cannot be studying people as much as someone who never programs. I never said anything about being a misfit. Modern societies are too diverse for the word to be used without qualification. Being part of a subculture, like science or academia is only a problem when it prevents comfortable interaction with people from different subcultures. Part of the subculture of AI is that the intellectual tools of maths and physics transfer to the study of humans. Part of the subculture of human disciplines is that they do not. I would be a misfit in AI, AI types could be misfits in a human discipline. I've certainly seen a lot of misanthropy and "we're building a better humanity" in recent postings. Along with last year's debate over "flawed" minds, it's clear that many posters to this group believe they can do a better job than whatever made us. But what is it exactly that an AI is going to be better than? No image of man, no superior AI. Wonder that's why some AI people have to run humanity down. It improves the chance of ELIZA being better than us. The point I have been making repeatedly is that you cannot study human intelligence without studying humans. John Anderson and his paradigm partners and Vision apart, there is a lot of AI research which has never been near a human being. Once again, what the hell can a computer program tell us about ourselves? Secondly, what can it tell us that we couldn't find out by studying people instead? -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert The proper object of the study of humanity is humans, not machines