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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: AI and Sociology
Message-ID: <5643@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 4 Jun 88 16:09:56 GMT
Article-I.D.: venera.5643
References: <1033@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <1301@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
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Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
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In article <1301@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert
Cockton) writes:
>  AI can be
>mulitidisciplinary, but it is, for me, unique in its insistence on a single 
>paradigm which MUST distort the researcher's view of humanity, as well as the 
>research consumer's view on a bad day.  Indefensible.
>
. . . and patently untrue!  Perhaps Mr. Cockton has suffered from an attempt to
study AI in such a dogmatic environment.  His little anecdote about the
advior who put him off AI is quite telling.  I probably would have been
put off by such an attitude, too.  Fortunately, I could affort the luxury
of changing advisors without changing my personal interest in questions I
wanted to pursue.

First of all, it is most unclear that there is any single paradigm for the
pursuit of artificial intelligence.  Secondly, it is at least somewhat unclear
that any paradigm which certainly will INFLUENCE one's view of humanity also
necessarily DISTORTS it.  To assume that the two thousands years of philosophy
which have preceded us have provided an undistorted view of humanity is
arrogance in its most ignorant form.  Finally, having settled that there
is more than one paradigm, we can hardly accuse the AI community of INSISTING
on any paradigm.
>
>Again, I challenge AI's rejection of social criticisms of its paradigm.  We
>become what we are through socialisation, not programming (although some
>teaching IS close to programming, especially in mathematics).  Thus a machine
>can never become what we are, because it cannot experience socialisation in
>the
>same way as a human being.  Thus a machine can never reason like us, as it can
>never absorb its model of reality in a proper social context.  Again, there
>are
>well documented examples of the effect of social neglect on children.
>Machines
>will not suffer in the same way, as they only benefit from programming, and
>not all forms of human company.

Actually, if there is any agreement at all in the AI community it is in the
conviction to be sceptical of all authoritative usage of the word "never."
I, personally, do not feel that any social criticisms are being rejected
wholesale.  However, AI is a very difficult area to pursue (at least if
you are really interested in a research pursuit, as opposed to marketing
a new shell for building expert systems).  One of the most important keys
to getting any sort of viable result at all is understanding how to break
off a piece of the whole, big, intimidating problem whose investigation is
likely to provide some insight.  This generally leads to the construction
of a model, usually in the form of a software artifact.  The next key is
to investigate that model to see what it has REALLY told us.  A good example
of such an investigation is the one by Brown and Lenat on what AM and EURISKO
APPEAR (their words) to work.

There are valid questions about socialization which can probably be formulated
in terms of communities of automata.  However, we need to form a better vision
of what we can expect by way of the behavior of individual automata before we
can express those questions in any useful way.  There is no doubt that this
will take some time.  However, there is at least a glimmer of hope that when
we get around to expressing them, we will have a better idea of what we are
talking about than those who have chosen to reject the abstraction of
automata out of hand.