kirby@ut-ngp.UUCP (Bruce Kirby) (10/30/87)
I have a question for people: What practical effects do you think AI will have in the next ten years? What I am interested in is discovering what people expect to actually come out of AI research in the near future, and how that will affect society, business and government. I am not interested in the long-term questions of what AI will eventually accomplish. Some supplementary questions: - What field of AI will produce practical applications? - What will be the effect of a new application? (e.g. how would an effective translation mechanism affect the way people function?) - Who is likely to produce these useful applications? How are they to be introduced? Any comments/responses are welcome. I am just trying to get a feel for what other people see as the near-term effects of AI research. Bruce Kirby kirby@ngp.utexas.edu ...!ut-sally!ut-ngp!kirby
goldfain@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu (11/01/87)
Re: Products in the next 10 years coming from AI. One thing that is currently out there, is a growing body of expert systems. Many new ones are being churned out as we speak, and I think they will continue to be produced at a gently accelerating rate over the next decade. But many expert systems are frightfully narrow. They tend to be simplistic and only apply when problems are just right. So look for additional layers, which begin to show some real sophistication. I expect "multi-expert-system-management-systems" to appear and to exhibit qualities that will begin to look like the human traits of "judgement" and "learning by analogy", and systems that will improve with time (autonomously).
crawford@endor.harvard.edu (Alexander Crawford) (11/05/87)
The first impact from AI on software in general will be natural language interfaces. Various problems need to be solved, such as how to map English commands completely onto a particular application's set of commands COMPLETELY. (As Barbara Grosz says, if it can be said, it can be said in all ways, e.g. "Give me the production report", "Report", "How's production doing?".) Once this is completed for a large portion of applications, it will become a severe disadvantage in the marketplace NOT to offer a natural-language interface. Coupled with a NLI, machine-learning will allow applications to improve in different ways as they are used: -Interfaces can be customized easily, automatically, for different users. -Complex tasks can be learned automatically by having the application examine what the human operator does normally. -Search of problem spaces for solutions can be eliminated and replaced by knowledge. (This is called "chunking". See MACHINE LEARNING II, Michalski et al. Chapter 10: "The Chunking of Goal Hierarchies: A Generalized Model of Practice" by Rosenbloom and Newell.) -Alec (crawford@endor.UUCP)
rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) (04/07/88)
In article <1134@its63b.ed.ac.uk> gvw@its63b.ed.ac.uk (G Wilson) writes: >[re: my reference to natural language programs] >Errmmm...show me *any* program which can do these things? To date, >AI has been successful in these areas only when used in toy domains. > NLI's Datatalker, translation programs marketed by Logos, ALPs, WCC, & other companies, LUNAR, the LIFER programs, CLOUT, Q&A, ASK, INTELLECT, etc. There are plenty. All have flaws. Some are more "toys" than others. Some are more commercially successful than others. (The goal of machine translation, at present, is to increase the efficiency of translators--not to produced polished translations.) >... Does anyone think AI would be as prominent >as it is today without (a) the unrealistic expectations of Star Wars, >and (b) America's initial nervousness about the Japanese Fifth Generation >project? > I do. The Japanese are overly optimistic. But they have shown greater persistence of vision than Americans in many commercial areas. Maybe they are attracted by the enormous potential of AI. While it is true that Star Wars needs AI, AI doesn't need Star Wars. It is difficult to think of a scientific project that wouldn't benefit by computers that behave more intelligently. >Manifest destiny?? A century ago, one could have justified >continued research in phrenology by its popularity. Judge science >by its results, not its fashionability. > Right. And in the early 1960's a lot of people believed that we couldn't land people on the moon. When Sputnik I was launched my 5th grade teacher told the class that they would never orbit a man around the earth. I don't know if phrenology ever had a respectable following in the scientific community. AI does, and we ought to pursue it whether it is popular or not. >I think AI can be summed up by Terry Winograd's defection. His >SHRDLU program is still quoted in *every* AI textbook (at least all >the ones I've seen), but he is no longer a believer in the AI >research programme (see "Understanding Computers and Cognition", >by Winograd and Flores). Weisenbaum's defection is even better known, and his Eliza program is cited (but not quoted :-) in every AI textbook too. Winograd took us a quantum leap beyond Weisenbaum. Let's hope that there will be people to take us a quantum leap beyond Winograd. But if our generation lacks the will to tackle the problems, you can be sure that the problems will wait around for some other generation. They won't get solved by pessimists. Henry Ford had a good way of putting it: "If you believe you can, or if you believe you can't, you're right." -- Rick Wojcik csnet: rwojcik@boeing.com uucp: {uw-june uw-beaver!ssc-vax}!bcsaic!rwojcik address: P.O. Box 24346, MS 7L-64, Seattle, WA 98124-0346 phone: 206-865-3844