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From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: The future of AI [was Re: Time Magazine -- Computers of the Future]
Message-ID: <8805071437.AA26634@bu-cs.bu.edu>
Date: 7 May 88 14:37:21 GMT
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Re: the social sciences, AI etc...

The important event that has happened in psychology in the past twenty
or so years is the movement from a descriptive model (eg. poke a brain
with a stimulus like a question or a light to react to, record the
result, try to fit it into a statistical model and relate the repeated
results to other variables) towards a functional model (try to build a
machine which exhibits the same behavior as a mind on the assumption
that this can provide insight into how the mind must work.)

In many ways I think this is critical to psychology becoming a true
science, probably an engineering science as well. It was the movement
from observing it externally to the development of models. Just as
physics went from sitting and watching things move and developing
stories about why they might do that to producing mathematical and
other models which predict and model the behavior observed.

At some point we might be able to make such a paradigm shift in the
other social sciences. I don't know whether or not it is critical to
view something like a society as the sum of its individual minds and,
thus, you must first understand the mind to understand the interaction
of many minds.

For example, one did not need to know atomic physics to write down a
useful theory of mechanics. It has been helpful to grind out the noise
and make more accurate models (eg. molecular models of friction no
doubt make our theories of mechanics more accurate, but they were
hardly necessary to basically understand the principals of a ball
rolling down a hill.)

Although there is little doubt that our social sciences are in their
fetal stages (ie. their methodologies probably have to undergo radical
shifts) I believe that by being able to use computers to build
functioning models to study we may be getting a glimpse of what that
future methodology will have to be.

Simulation is the new mathematics of science. Computers are its
pencil and paper.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University