JMC@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (John McCarthy) (04/07/88)
In article <962@daisy.UUCP> klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee) writes: > >Is AI just too expensive and too complicated for practical use? I >spent 3 years in the field and I'm beginning to think the answer is >mostly yes. In my opinion, all working AI programs are either toys or >could have been developed much more cheaply using conventional >techniques. At last I get to use a retort that I thought of a half hour too late almost 30 years ago. After one of my first public lectures on LISP in about 1960 in which I gave examples of algebraic computations, someone in the back of the audience, I think his name might have been Carl Peterson, said scornfully, "I could easily have programmed all that in assembly language". The retort should have been, "Well then, why didn't you?"