sas@BBN.COM (04/16/88)
- Watch those Pony Express arguments. Remember, the Pony Express was a temporary hack. It ran for a bit under two years before it was replaced by the transcontinental railroad. - If you want a humorous account of the problems of really, really understanding things I'll recommend Morris Zap's Semantics as Strip Tease talk in David Lodge's novel Small World. Granted, he was talking about the problems with deconstruction, but it's marvelously applicable to AI. - Phrenology was largely considered hokum in the last century, but craniometry was highly regarded. Check out Gould's the Mismeasure of Man. - I think AI has already proven its worth by attacking and to some extent solving certain classes of problems. Don't expect the solutions to look as magical as the problems. Chess programs, symbolic math programs, expert systems, robotics and the like are all real technologies now. Materials science may not have all the glamor of QCD but it's a pretty exciting field none the less. - I finally, figured out what bothers me about nanotechnology. In a sense it is irrelevant. If there is a way to make machines that can translate Dickens into Turkish it doesn't really matter if they are as big as a carwash, twice as ugly, and are limited by the speed of soapy water in a vacuum. Once we know how to translate, we can always make the machine smaller and faster. Nanotechnology seems to ignore the hard part of the problem in favor of the easy part. Seth ---- What do they call these things down at the bottom anyway? Letterfeet? ----
govett@avsd.UUCP (David Govett) (04/18/88)
> > - Watch those Pony Express arguments. Remember, the Pony Express was > a temporary hack. It ran for a bit under two years before it was > replaced by the transcontinental railroad. > Not true. The PE was obviated by the transcontinental telegraph in 1861, I believe. The transcontinental RR wasn't completed until May 1869.