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From: dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Bringing AI back home
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Date: 2 Nov 88 15:54:37 GMT
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David H. West)
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In article <1776@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Gilbert Cockton writes:
>
>In a previous article, Ray Allis writes:
>>If AI is to make progress toward machines with common sense, we
>>should first rectify the preposterous inverted notion that AI is
>>somehow a subset of computer science,
>Nothing preposterous at all about this.  AI is about applications of
>computers, and you can't sensibly apply computers without using computer
>science.

All that this shows is that AI has a non-null intersection with CS,
not that it is a subset of it.

>  Many people would be happy if AI boy scouts came down
>from their technological utopian fantasies and addressed the sensible
>problem of optimising human-computer task allocation in a humble,
>disciplined and well-focussed manner.

Many people would have been happier (in the short term) if James
Watt had stopped his useless playing with kettles and gone out and got
a real job.

>There are tasks in the world.  Computers can assist some of these
>tasks, but not others.  Understanding why this is the case lies at the
>heart of proper human-machine system design.  The problem with hard AI is
>that it doesn't want to know that a real division between automatable
>and unautomatable tasks does exist in practice.  

You seem to believe that this boundary is fixed.  Well, it will be
unless people work on moving it.

>  Why are so
>many AI workers so damned ignorant of the problems with
>operationalising definitions of intelligence, as borne out by nearly a
>century of psychometrics here? 

There was a time when philosophers concerned themselves with
questions such as whether magnets move towards each other out
of love or against their will.  Why were those who wanted instead to
measure forces so damned ignorant of the problems with the
philosophical approach?   Maybe they weren't, and that's *why* they
preferred to measure forces.

>Common sense is a labelling activity
>for beliefs which are assumed to be common within a (sub)culture.

Partially.

>Such social constructs cannot have a machine embodiment, nor can any

Cannot? Why not?  "Do not at present" I would accept.

>The minute words like common sense and intelligence are used, the 
>relevant discipline becomes the sociology of knowledge.

*A* relevent discipline.  AI is at present more concerned with the
structure and machine implementation of common sense than with its
detailed content.  

-David West            dhw%iti@umix.cc.umich.edu
		       {uunet,rutgers,ames}!umix!itivax!dhw
CDSL, Industrial Technology Institute, PO Box 1485, 
Ann Arbor, MI 48106