Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!uwslh.UUCP!lishka From: lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Fish-Guts) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: The Grand Challenge is Foolish Message-ID: <391@uwslh.UUCP> Date: 9 Oct 88 18:21:51 GMT References: Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: uwslh!lishka@spool.cs.wisc.edu (Fish-Guts) Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison, State Hygiene Lab Lines: 38 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu In article JMC@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU writes: >[In reply to message sent Mon 26 Sep 1988 23:22-EDT.] >If John Nagle thinks that "The lesson of the last five years seems to >be that throwing money at AI is not enormously productive.", he is >also confusing science with engineering. It's like saying that the >lesson of the last five years of astronomy has been unproductive. >Progress in science is measured in longer periods than that. I don't think anyone could have said it better. If AI is going to progress at all, I think it will need quite a bit of time, for its goals seem to be fairly "grand." I think this definitely applies to research in Neural Nets and Connectionism: many people criticize this area, even though it has only really gotten going (again) in the past few years. There *have* been some really interesting discoveries due to AI; however, they have not been as amazing and earth-shattering as some would like. In my opinion, the great amount of hype in AI is what leads many people to say stuff such as "throwing money at AI is not enormously productive." If many scientists and companies would stop making their research or products out to be much more than they actually are, I feel that others reviewing the AI field would not be so critical. Many AI researchers and companies need to be much more "modest" in assessing their work; they should not make promises they cannot keep. After all, the goal of achieving true "artificial intelligence" (in the literal sense of the phrase) is not one that will occur in the next two, ten, fifty, one-hundred, or maybe even one-thousand years. .oO Chris Oo. -- Christopher Lishka ...!{rutgers|ucbvax|...}!uwvax!uwslh!lishka Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene lishka%uwslh.uucp@cs.wisc.edu Immunology Section (608)262-1617 lishka@uwslh.uucp ---- "...Just because someone is shy and gets straight A's does not mean they won't put wads of gum in your arm pits." - Lynda Barry, "Ernie Pook's Commeek: Gum of Mystery"