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.
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