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