LANSKY@SRI-WARBUCKS.ARPA (Amy Lansky) (07/23/86)
OUR COGNITIVE ABILITIES LIMIT THE POWER OF AI
Jack Alpert (ALPERT@SCORE)
Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab
and
School of Education, Stanford University
11:00 AM, MONDAY, July 28
SRI International, Building E, Room EK228
"Expert Systems: How far can they go?" was a panel topic at AAAI
1985. Brian Smith described the limits of AI in terms of the
programmer's ability to know if his encoded model reflected the world
that his expert system was to manage. "We have no techniques.. to
study the ... relationship between model and world. We are unable...
to assess the appropriateness of models, or to predict when models
fail."
Most of us with icy road experience are convinced we know how to
recover from skids. In the talk I will prove that our skid recovery
algorithms work only on a small set of possible skids. Skids that lie
outside of this small set result in accidents. Our "inappropriate"
skid recovery models cause accidents. 20 years of driving experience
does not revile the skid model's limitations. When we have been
building expert systems for 20 years, why should we be any better
prepared to perceive model inappropriateness?
The limited set of cognitive abilities that most people develop cannot
identify domains where models fail. I describe a temporal cognitive
ability most of us lack. Given the definition of such an ability, I
will briefly describe a line of research that explains why people
never develop the ability. Should this research be successful, we
will create new learning environments that enhance first cognitive
abilities, then modeling, and finally the power of AI systems.
VISITORS: Please arrive 5 minutes early so that you can be escorted up
from the E-building receptionist's desk. Thanks!