Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!paris.ics.uci.edu!venera.isi.edu!harp
From: harp@venera.isi.edu (Brian Harp)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: "AI" means "Artificial Intelligence" (was Re: a small subset of AI)
Message-ID: <7112@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 20 Dec 88 16:31:48 GMT
References: <1185@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <46069@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: harp@venera.isi.edu.UUCP (Brian Harp)
Organization: Information Sciences Institute, Univ. of So. California
Lines: 48

In article <46069@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Krulwich-Bruce@cs.yale.edu (Bruce Krulwich) writes:

>>Can anyone tell me how AI on computers entails consideration of free-will,
>>self-awareness, consciousness, subconsciousness, unconsciousness or, in
>>short, non-biological human replication?
>
>Can anyone tell me how Artificial Intelligence on computers entails 
>consideration of inventory management, weather forcasting, or, in short,
>things that are in no way an aspect of general human intelligence??
>

So human intelligence isn't an aspect of inventory management or weather
forecasting?   I don't really think you meant that, did you?
Obviously, human expertise is essential to doing any of these kind of
tasks and we must analyze how humans do it before we can hope to have
computers do it.  Computers may not do inventory management (for
example) in the same way as humans do, but we need to know how humans
do inventory management since they are our only source of information.

>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>For those of you who don't see my point, let me make it clear:
>
>		"AI" means "Artificial Intelligence"     ( ** )
>
>Now, there are clearly many subfields within "AI" that are very different from
>each other.  Work in expert systems, story understanding, AI programming,
>learning, planning, theorem proving, etc. are all different in their emphasis
>and approaches.  Keep in mind, though, that the goal is "intelligence."
>That's what the name means.
>
>One result of this is that many people think COMP.AI has a low S/N ratio while
>everyone thinks their stuff is the "good" stuff.  Splitting into several
>newsgroups (COMP.AI.EXPERT-SYSTEMS, COMP.AI.MIND, COMP.AI.PROGRAMMING,
>COMP.AI.HUMAN, COMP.AI.FORMAL, etc) has been suggested before, and maybe it
>should be discussed again.
>

I don't think the number of articles in comp.ai is high enough to
merit separate news groups.  In addition, I think these sub-areas are
contributing to our understanding of computer intelligence (or AI) in
general.  This is how science works.  We just aren't ready to tackle
general intelligence yet and in fact I'm not sure we will ever be
able to directly work on making a computer "intelligent".  It will
probably just evolve as we understand these subproblems better.

Brian Harp
USC/ISI