Anonymous@uicsl.UUCP (11/29/83)
#R:sri-arpa:-1393300:uicsl:15500017:000:1265 uicsl!Anonymous Nov 28 09:10:00 1983 re: The Great Promises of AI Beware the promises of used car salesmen. The press has stories to sell, and so do the more extravagant people within AI. Remember that may of these people had to work hard to convince grantmakers that AI was worth their money, back in the days before practical applications of expert systems began to pay off. It is important to distinguish the promises of AI from the great fantasies that have been speculated by the media (and some AI researchers) in a fit of science fiction. AI applications will certainly be diverse and widespread (thanks no less to the VLSI people). However, I hope that none of us really believes that machines will possess human general intelligence any time soon. We banter about such stuff hoping that when ideas fly, at least some of them will be good ones. The reality is that nobody sees a clear and brightly lit path from here to super-intelligent robots. Rather we see hundreds of problems to be solved. Each solution should bring our knowledge and the capabilities of our programs incrementally forward. But lets not kid ourselves about the complexity of the problems. As it has already been pointed out, AI is tackling the hard problems -- the ones for which nobody knows any algorithms.