bnevin@CCH.BBN.COM (Bruce E. Nevin) (07/03/88)
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 88 14:18 EDT From: Bruce E. Nevin <bnevin@cch.bbn.com> Subject: ON applying AI To: nl-kr@cs.rochester.edu, ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu cc: bn@cch.bbn.com The following is excerpted without permission from The Boston Globe Magazine for June 26, 1988, pp. 39-42 of the cover article by D. C. Denison entitled "The ON team, software whiz Mitch Kapor's new venture": In the conference room, where the ON team has assembled for a group interview, a question is posed: What developments in artificial intelligence have made their project possible? The first response comes immediately: "The lack of progress." Then William Woods, ON's principal technologist, takes a turn. "What came out of artificial intelligence that's useful to us is kind of like what came out of the space program that's useful for everybody on Earth --" "Velcro," someone interrupts. "Tang." From the other side of the table. "Are we the Tang of artificial intelligence?" Woods continues undaunted. "Artificial intelligence has given us a tool kit of engineering techniques. AI has been driven by people who've been tilting at windmills, but their techniques are pretty good for what we want to do." <Paragraph on Bill's background & experience omitted> Although the early promise of artificial-intelligence research has been tempered--we still don't have computers that can understand English or reason like a human expert--the possibilities are so seductive, so intriguing, and so potentially profitable that the field continues to attract some of the best minds in the computer field. Which is why it wans't surprising that when Mitchell Kapor left Lotus two years ago, he became a visiting scholar at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science, a leading center of artifial-intelligence-related research. And it's not at all surprising that when Kapor and [Peter] Miller put together the ON team, at least one AI veteran of Woods' stature was part of the group. Yet "artificial intelligence" has become such a buzzword, such an umbrella term, that when the topic is brought up, experts such as Woods and interested explorers such as Kapor take deep breaths and try to redefine the terms of discussion. "When you talk about AI," Kapor says, "you're talking about many, many things at once: a body of research, certain kinds of goals and aspirations that are characteristic of the people who are in it, certain fields of inquiry; you've got soft stuff, you've got hard stuff, you have mythology--the term 'AI' casts a broad shadow. "I also think there's a reason why so much attention is paid to the AI question in the nontechnical press," he continues, "and that is that there are some very bombastic people in the AI community who have spoken incredibly irresponsibly, who've made careers out of that. But if you make the assumption that because AI gets a lot of attention in the press there's a lot going on in the field, you might be making a big mistake." When Kapor and Woods first met soon after Kapor left Lotus, they discovered that they shared a similar view of the value of current AI research. First of all, they both felt that the goal most often attributed to artificial-intelligence research--the creation of a computer that "thinks" just like a human--was so remote as to be essentially impossible. Kapor's experience at MIT had convinced him that scientists still have no idea how people really think. Therefore, any attempt to design a computer that works the way people think is doomed. A more realistic approach, according to Kapor, would be to design computer programs that are compatible with the way people think, that help amplify a person's intelligence rather than try to duplicate it. Kapor felt that some artificial-intelligence techniques, when applied to that goal, could be very powerful. <Another bg paragraph omitted> Last year, Woods, who was working at Applied Expert Systems, discovered that Kaapor had leased a floor in the same building, and he began stopping in for informal conversations. Eventually, after discussing the ON Technology project with Kapor and Miller, and studying their business plan, he accepted the position of principal technologist and moved his things down two floors into a large corner office. <paragraph omitted about micros such as Mac II getting more memory> One of the possibilities [that opens up], which Woods will be actively working on during the next two years, is a more sympathetic fit between people and their computers. "I want to take an abstract perspective of what people's mental machinery does very well and what a machine can do well," Woods says, "and design ways that you can couple the two together to complement each other. For example, machines can do long sequences of complicated steps without leaving out one. People will forget something with frequency. On the other hand, people can walk down the street without falling in holes. To get a mechanical artifact to do that is a challenge that hasn't even been aapproximately approached after several decades of research." Woods pauses to frame his thoughts. "But if you could get the right interface technology and conceptual framework, on the machine side, to match up with what people really want to do on our side--that would be a very nice arrangement. Bruce Nevin bn@cch.bbn.com <usual_disclaimer>