Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!glacier!jbn From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Arguments against AI are arguments against human formalisms Message-ID: <17438@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> Date: 11 May 88 04:39:31 GMT References:<368693.880430.MINSKY@AI.AI.MIT.EDU> <1579@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1103@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <413@aiva.ed.ac.uk> Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 24 In article <1103@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) writes: > BTW, Robots aren't AI. Robots are robots. Rod Brooks has written "Robotics is a superset of AI". Robots have all the problems of stationary artificial intelligences, plus many more. Several of the big names in AI did work in robotics back in the early days of AI. McCarthy, Minsky, Winograd, and Shannon all did robotics work at one time. But they did it in a day when the difficulty of the problems to be faced was not recognized. There was great optimism in the early days, but even such seemingly simple problems such as grasping turned out to be very hard. Non-trivial problems such as general automatic assembly or automatic driving under any but the most benign conditions turned out to be totally out of reach with the techniques available. Progress has been made, but by inches. Nevertheless, I suspect that over the next few years, robotics will start to make a contribution to the more classic AI problems, as the techniques being developed for geometric reasoning and sensor fusion start to become the basis for new approaches to artificial intelligence. I consider robotics a very promising field at this point in time. But I must offer a caution. Working in robotics is risky. Failure is so obvious. This can be bad for your career. John Nagle