Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!oberon!sm.unisys.com!randvax!leverich From: leverich@randvax.UUCP (Brian Leverich) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Grand Challenges Summary: Maybe we've made progress and haven't noticed... Message-ID: <1717@randvax.UUCP> Date: 27 Sep 88 15:29:56 GMT References: <123@feedme.UUCP> <17736@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> Reply-To: leverich@rand-unix.UUCP (Brian Leverich) Organization: RAND Corp., Santa Monica, CA Lines: 34 In article <17736@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) writes: > > The lesson of the last five years seems to be that throwing money at >AI is not enormously productive. Recent "big science" failures notwithstanding, the infusion of money into AI may turn out to have been a more productive investment than we realize. As a case in point, consider expert system technology. It seems doubtful that the technology is currently or soon will be capable of capturing human "expertise" in more than a relative handful of freakishly well-defined domains. That doesn't mean the technology is useless, though. Antiquated COBOL programming replaced or substantially increased the productivity of millions of clerks who used to do the arithmetic necessary to maintain ledgers. There still are millions of clerks out there who perform evaluation activities that can be very well defined but are too complex to cost-effectively program, debug, maintain, and document in COBOL. A safe bet is that over the next decade what shells _really_ do is allow the business data processing community to automate a whole class of clerical activities they haven't been able to handle in the past. Unglamorous as it seems, that single class of applications will really (no hype) save industry billions of dollars. Rather than looking at how well research is satisfying its own goals, when talking about the productivity of research it may make more sense to take a hard-headed "engineering" perspective and ask what can be built after the research that couldn't be built before. -- "Simulate it in ROSS" Brian Leverich | U.S. Snail: 1700 Main St. ARPAnet: leverich@rand-unix | Santa Monica, CA 90406 UUCP/usenet: decvax!randvax!leverich | Ma Bell: (213) 393-0411 X7769