Systems Approach Full disclosure: I have a history with AI, having flirted with it in the 1980s (remember expert systems?) and then having safely avo

Forget the AI doom and hype, let's make computers useful

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2024-04-25 08:00:04

Systems Approach Full disclosure: I have a history with AI, having flirted with it in the 1980s (remember expert systems?) and then having safely avoided the AI winter of the late 1980s by veering off into formal verification before finally landing on networking as my specialty in 1988.

And just as my Systems Approach colleague Larry Peterson has classics like the Pascal manual on his bookshelf, I still have a couple of AI books from the Eighties on mine, notably P. H. Winston’s Artificial Intelligence (1984). Leafing through that book is quite a blast, in the sense that much of it looks like it might have been written yesterday. For example, the preface begins this way:

The field of Artificial Intelligence has changed enormously since the first edition of this book was published. Subjects in Artificial Intelligence are de rigueur for undergraduate computer-science majors, and stories on Artificial Intelligence are regularly featured in most of the reputable news magazines. Part of the reason for change is that solid results have accumulated.

I was also intrigued to see some 1984 examples of “what computers can do.” One example was solving seriously hard calculus problems – notable because accurate arithmetic seems to be beyond the capabilities of today’s LLM-based systems.