hafner@CORWIN.CCS.NORTHEASTERN.EDU (11/06/87)
In AIList V5 #255 Bruce Kirby asked what practical effects AI will have in the next 10 years, and how that will affect society, business, and government. One practical effect that I expect to see is the integration of logic programming with database technology, producing new deductive databases that will replace traditional databases. (In my vision, in 15 years no one will want to buy a database management system that does not support a prolog-like data definition and query language.) David D. H. D. Warren wrote a paper on this in the VLDB conference in 1981, and the database research community is busy trying to work out the details right now. Of course, the closer this idea comes to a usable technology, the less AIish it seems to many people. I can speculate on how this will affect society, business, and government: it will make many new applications of databases possible, for management, manufacturing, planning, etc. Right now, database technology is very hard to use effectively for complex applications. (Many application projects are never successfully completed - they are crushed by the complexity of getting them working right. Ordinary programmers simply can't hack these applications, and brilliant programmers don't want to.) Deductive databases will be so much easier to create, maintain and use, that computers will finally be able to fulfill their promise of making complex organizations more manageable. White collar productivity will be improved beyond anyone's current expectations. A negative side effect of this development (along with personal computers and office automation) will be serious unemployment in the white collar work force. The large administrative and middle management work force will shrink permanently, just as the large industrial work force has. All of the above, of course, is simply an opinion, backed up by (hopefully) common sense. Carole Hafner csnet: hafner@northeastern.edu