Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!BU-CS.BU.EDU!bzs 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 References: <400@aiva.ed.ac.uk> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 41 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