Date: Sun 1 May 1988 20:58-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-To: AIList@KL.SRI.COM Us-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V6 #88 - Philosophy To: AIList@KL.SRI.COM Status: R AIList Digest Monday, 2 May 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 88 Today's Topics: Opinion - AI Goals & Free Will & Sociology ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 26 Apr 88 15:06:48 GMT From: trwrb!aero!venera.isi.edu!smoliar@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Stephen Smoliar) Subject: Re: Expert Systems in the Railroad Industry. In article <73@edai.ed.ac.uk> ceb@edai (Colin Bridgewater) writes: > Just to get my two penn'orth in, whatever happened to dynamic programming >for scheduling, cargo-space optimisation and inventory control etc ? This >well-worn technique is quite adequate for the majority of purposes envisaged >by EL. I mention this to raise a wider issue which was possibly not in the >mind of the original sender, namely that of the desire to throw ever more >complex solution procedures at the simplest of problems.... > > Why should we want to implement an expert system, when adequate techniques >exist already ? That is, is the application of expert system technology >appropriate to the magnitude and complexity of the problem ? Should we be >advocating the application of such 'high-tech' solutions to all and sundry ? >I have no doubt that such systems could be made to work, don't get me wrong >on that, I just question whether the level of technology required in order to >do so is justified. Surely it is better to apply the simplest solutions when- >ever possible. There is one issue of "appropriate technology" which appears to have been overlooked in Colin's argument; and that is the matter of computational tractability. In many practical domains, while it is certainly possible to build mathematical models which may then be processed by dynamic programming, those models are too unwieldy to yield much useful information in any reasonable period of time. Often what makes an expert an expert is the ability to recognize that a complex general-purpose model may be considerably simplified through abstraction without significantly sacrificing fidelity. The mathematical nature of the model, in and of itself, cannot provide us with information of how to perform such abstractions. That is often why we need experts; and, in such cases, if that expertise can be properly modeled by an expert system, a computationally intractable approach can be turned into a practical one. ------------------------------ Date: 28 Apr 88 09:15:47 GMT From: mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!simon@uunet.uu.net (Simon Brooke) Subject: Re: The future of AI [was Re: Time Magazine -- Computers of the Future] In article <445@novavax.UUCP> maddoxt@novavax.UUCP (Thomas Maddox) writes: (flaming against an article submitted by Gilbert Cockton) > "Rigorous sociology/contemporary anthropology"? Ha ha ha ha >ha ha ha ha, &c. What do the third and subsequent iterations of the symbol 'ha' add to the meaning of this statement? Are we to assume the author doubts the rigour of Sociology, or the contemporary nature of anthropology? >And some of the most interesting investigations of topics once dominated >by the humanities, such as theory of mind, are taking place in AI labs. This is, of course, true - some of it is. Just as some of the most interesting advances in Artificial Intelligence take place in Philosophy and Linguistics departments. This is what one would expect, after all; for what is AI but an experimental branch of Philosophy? >sociologists produce a great deal of nonsense, and indeed the social >"sciences" in toto are afflicted by conceptual confusion at every >level. Ideologues, special interest groups, purveyors of outworn >dogma (Marxists, Freudians, et alia) continue to plague the social >sciences in a way that would be almost unimaginable in the sciences, Gosh! Isn't it nice, now and again, to read the words of someone whose knowledge of a field is so deep and thorough that they can some it up in one short paragraph! It is, of course, true that some embarassingly poor work is published in Sociology, just as in any other discipline; perhaps indeed there is more poor sociology, simply because sociology is more difficult to do well than any other type of study - most of the phenomena of sociology occurs in the interaction between individuals, and this interaction cannot readily be accessed by an observer who is not party to the interaction. Yet if you are part of the interaction, it will not proceed as it would with someone else... Again, sociological investigation, because it looks at us in a rigorous way which we are not used to, often leads to conclusions which seem counter-intuitive - they cut through our self-deceits and hypocrisies. So we prefer to abuse the messenger rather than listen to the message. For the rest: He who knows not an knows not he knows not...... A dictum which I will conveniently forget next time I feel like shooting my mouth off. ** Simon Brooke ********************************************************* * e-mail : simon@uk.ac.lancs.comp * * surface: Dept of Computing, University of Lancaster, LA 1 4 YW, UK. * * * * Thought for today: Most prologs chew everything very slowly anyway, * ***just being polite I guess********************************************* ------------------------------ Date: 28 Apr 88 10:53:57 GMT From: mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert@uunet.uu.net (Gilbert Cockton) Subject: Re: The future of AI [was Re: Time Magazine -- Computers of the Future] In article <445@novavax.UUCP> maddoxt@novavax.UUCP (Thomas Maddox) writes: >By comparison, sociologists produce a great deal of nonsense, and indeed the >social "sciences" in toto are afflicted by conceptual confusion at every >level. Ideologues, special interest groups, purveyors of outworn >dogma (Marxists, Freudians, et alia) continue to plague the social >sciences in a way that would be almost unimaginable in the sciences, >even in a field as slippery, ill-defined, and protean as AI. There are more of them :-) But if you looked at the work of U.K. sociologists like Townsend and Halsey on Age, Poverty, Health and social mobility, you might find something less concerned with theory and more with rigorous investigation. I find the conflict in the humanities and behvioural "sciences" far more healthy than the uncritical following of fashions of paradigms in science. Whilst the former areas encourage an understanding of methodology and epistemology, the sciences assume their core methods are correct and get on with it. A lot boils down to personality (Liam Hudson, Contrary Imaginations). The reason that ideology and methodological pluralism would be unimaginable in the sciences may have something to do with the nature (and please, not the LACK) of the scientific imagination compared to the humanist imagination. Note that materialism, determinism, statistical inference and positivism are no less outworn dogmas and ideologies than are Marxism, Freudianism, etc. My experience is that someone from a humanist critical tradition will have a better understanding of the assumptions behind methodologies than will scientists and even more so, engineers. Out of such understandings came the rejection of first Medieval Catholicism, then Seventeeth Century materialism, Twentieth Century Behaviourism and Systems Theory, and now the "pure" AI position. Assumptions behind AI are similar to many which have been around since the warm humility of Renaissance Humanism cooled into the mechanical fascination of the Baroque. >So talk about "philistine technical vacuums" if you wish, but >remember that by and large people know which emperor has no clothes. So who is it who is deciding strategy for most Western social programmes? Clothes or no clothes, social administrators have an empire which extends beyond academia and many of them draw on sociological concepts and results in their work. It is in their complete ignorance of socialisation that AI workers fall down in their study of machine learning. Most human learning always takes place in a social context, with only the private interests of marginal adolescents and adults taking place in isolation - but here they draw on problem solving capabilities which were nutured in a social context. The starkest examples of the nature and role of primary socialisation come from those few unfortunate children who had been isolated from birth. They are savage animals. If parents had to interact with their children in FOPC or connectionist inputs, the same would be true, until the children were taken into care. >Also, if you want to say "one dead end after another," you might adduce actual >dead ends pursued by AI research and contrast them with non-dead ends. DEAD ENDS Computational Lingusitics, continuous speech understanding, intelligent vision, reliable expert systems which do not require endless maintenance, human problem solving, the physical symbol system hypothesis, knowledge representation formalisms using computable models. Largely areas where some other paradigm within another discipline can make progress as the lead weight of computability is not suffocating research. Generally due to knowledge representation problems - even the Novel has problems here :-) If you can't write it in a text-book (e.g. clinical diagnosis, teaching techniques, advocacy), you'll never get it on a machine - impossible in superset (NL) => inpossible in subset (FOPC, computationally denotable/constructable). A problem in AI is trying to solve other people's problems, where those other people know more about the problem than you ever will - they live it day in day out. NON-DEAD ENDS Much work done under the name of AI is good - low-to-medium level vision, restricted natural language, knowledge-based programming formalisms, theorem-proving and highly-constrained technical planning problems. Indeed, most technical knowledge, being artificial and symbolic from the outset, is an obvious candidate for AI modelling and there is nothing in the humanist tradition which would doubt the viability of this work. Here knowledge representation is easy, because the domain will generally be so boring (but economically/environmentally/security critical) that no-one wants to argue about it. Much technical expertise executed by humans is best suited to machines. In HCI research, sensible work on intelligent (=supportive) user interfaces is getting somewhere, but then coming up with a computer model of a computer system is hardly a major challenge in knowledge representation techniques. Coming up with a computer model of a user is also possible, as long as we don't try to model anything controversial, but stick to observable behaviour and user-negotiated input. The main objection to AI is when it claims to approach our humanity. It cannot. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 30 Apr 88 23:39:49 EDT From: Marvin Minsky Subject: AIList V6 #86 - Philosophy Yamauchi, Cockton, and others on AILIST have been discussing freedom of will as though no AI researchers have discussed it seriously. May I ask you to read pages 30.2, 30.6 and 30.7 of The Society of Mind. I claim to have a good explanation of the free-will phenomenon. I agree with Gilbert Cockton that it is not the lack of answers that should be criticised, but the contemporary ignorance of the subject. (As for why my own answer evaded philosophers for millenia, My hypothesis is that philosophers have not been very insightful about actual psychological phenomena - which is why it had to wait for Freud - or, perhaps, Poincare - to produce convincing discussions about the importance of unconscious thinking.) Cockton also sagely points out that a rule-based or other mechanical account of cognition and decision making is at odds with the doctrine of free will which underpins most Western morality. ... Scientists who seek moral, ethical, epistemological or methodological vacuums are only marginalising themselves into positions where social forces will rightly constrain their work. I only disagree with Cockton's insertion of "rightly". Like E.O.Wilson, I prefer follow ideas even where they lead to potentially unpopular conclusions. Indeed, I feel it is only proper for those social forces to try to constrain my work. When the researchers feel constrained to censor their own work, then everyone may end up the poorer in the end. I'm not even sure this is a disagreement. A closer look might show that this is what Cockton is actually saying, too. ------------------------------ Date: 1 May 88 06:50:41 GMT From: TAURUS.BITNET!shani@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU Subject: Re: Free Will & Self-Awareness In article <912@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>, ok@quintus.BITNET writes: > compatible with strong determinism. (The ones I've seen are riddled with > logical errors, but most philosophical arguments I've seen are.) That is correct, but there are few which arn't and that is mainly because they mannaged to avoid self-contradictions and mixing of concepts... O.S. ------------------------------ Date: 30 Apr 88 16:37:20 GMT From: uflorida!novavax!maddoxt@gatech.edu (Thomas Maddox) Subject: Social science gibber [Was Re: Various Future of AI Summary: Here we have a prime specimen of the species Keywords: AI, Sociology, manners. In article <502@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk> simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke) writes: >In article <445@novavax.UUCP> maddoxt@novavax.UUCP (Thomas Maddox) writes: > >> "Rigorous sociology/contemporary anthropology"? Ha ha ha ha >>ha ha ha ha, &c. > >What do the third and subsequent iterations of the symbol 'ha' add to the >meaning of this statement? Are we to assume the author doubts the rigour >of Sociology, or the contemporary nature of anthropology? Yeah, I think you could assume both, pal. Repeated "ha"s added for emphasis, in case some lamebrain (sociologist? if the shoe fits . . . ) wandered through and needed help. >>And some of the most interesting investigations of topics once dominated >>by the humanities, such as theory of mind, are taking place in AI labs. > >This is, of course, true - some of it is. Just as some of the most >interesting advances in Artificial Intelligence take place in Philosophy >and Linguistics departments. This is what one would expect, after all; for >what is AI but an experimental branch of Philosophy? "AI but an experimental branch of Philosophy," eh? Let's see, now: according to that view, I believe *every* branch of what we usually call science could be construed in this way . . . or not. In short, the statement is almost perfectly empty. Or maybe the secret is in the use of the word "Philosophy." That must be a special variant of common or run-of-the-mill "philosophy," capitalized for occult reasons known only to its initiates. Also, I have no quarrel with these "most interesting advances" that are coming out of philosophy and linguistic departments. Philosophy and linguistics, you might notice, *not* sociology. Let's read on. He's quoting me now: >>sociologists produce a great deal of nonsense, and indeed the social >>"sciences" in toto are afflicted by conceptual confusion at every >>level. Ideologues, special interest groups, purveyors of outworn >>dogma (Marxists, Freudians, et alia) continue to plague the social >>sciences in a way that would be almost unimaginable in the sciences, Then he returns to his own lovely prose: >Gosh! Isn't it nice, now and again, to read the words of someone whose >knowledge of a field is so deep and thorough that they can some it up in >one short paragraph! "Some it up in one short paragraph"? No, really, I can't "some" it up; don't even know what doing so means. However, if you are trying in your inept fashion to say, "sum it up," thanks. I thought it was a pretty good paragraph myself. >It is, of course, true that some embarassingly poor work is published in >Sociology, just as in any other discipline; perhaps indeed there is more >poor sociology, simply because sociology is more difficult to do well than >any other type of study - most of the phenomena of sociology occurs in the >interaction between individuals, and this interaction cannot readily be >accessed by an observer who is not party to the interaction. Yet if you >are part of the interaction, it will not proceed as it would with someone >else... We're told "most of the phenomena . . . occurs" [subject-verb agreement], further that "this interaction cannot readily be accessed by an observer" [unnecessary jargon borrowed from another field and used for the appearance of scientific rigor]. I guarantee it, this guy *must* be a social scientist, sociologist or not. >Again, sociological investigation, because it looks at us in a >rigorous way which we are not used to, often leads to conclusions which >seem counter-intuitive - they cut through our self-deceits and hypocrisies. >So we prefer to abuse the messenger rather than listen to the message. "Sociological investigation . . . looks at us in a rigorous way which we are not used to," the man says. On his evidence, it's through a glass darkly, which, alas, we are all quite used to. The notion of sociology as a bringer of ugly truths is particularly amusing, though, and I thank him for it. I should add that I felt some remorse for my slap at sociology, because the essential plight of the social sciences is quite desperate. However, when I read the message quoted above, my remorse evaporated. I would simply add that many sociologists, whatever the ultimate value of their work, *can* read, write, and think. Also, present polemics aside, my original diatribe came as a response to a particularly self-satisfied posting from (apparently) a sociologist attacking AI research as uninformed, puerile, &c. It seemed (and seems) to me that anyone in such an inherently weak field should be rather careful in his criticism: he's in the position of a man throwing bricks at passers-by through his own front window. So let me reiterate: AI research produces valuable and interesting work; sociology produces much, much less. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************