“Where’s the AI?”, 1991-12-15 (; backlinks):
[see the contemporaneous Winograd interview on SHRDLU] I survey 4 viewpoints about what AI is: (1) AI means magic bullets, (2) AI means inference engines, (3) AI means getting a machine to do something you didn’t think a machine could do (the “gee whiz” view), and (4) AI means having a machine learn. I describe a program exhibiting AI as one that can change as a result of interactions with the user.
Such a program would have to process hundreds or thousands of examples as opposed to a handful. Because AI is a machine’s attempt to explain the behavior of the (human) system it is trying to model, the ability of a program design to scale up is critical.
Researchers need to face the complexities of scaling up to programs that actually serve a purpose. The move from toy domains into concrete ones has 3 big consequences for the development of AI. First, it will force software designers to face the idiosyncrasies of its users. Second, it will act as an important reality check between the language of the machine, the software, and the user. Third, the scaled-up programs will become templates for future work.
…The correct AI question had to do with the generality of a solution to a problem, and there was a good reason. It is trivial to build a program to do what, say, Winograd 1972’s SHRDLU program did for 31 sentences. Just match 31 strings with 31 behaviors. It would take a day to program. People believed that Winograd’s program was an AI program because they believed that his program “did it right.” They believed it would scale up. They believed that it would work on more than 31 sentences. (In fact, so did he. See 1973). At the time, when I was asked my opinion of Winograd’s work, I replied that it would never work on a substantially larger number of sentences, nor would it work in different domains than the one for which it was designed. I did not reply that his program was not AI, however.
The fact that a program does not scale up does not necessarily disqualify it from being AI. The ideas in Winograd’s program were AI ideas; they just weren’t correct AI ideas in my opinion.
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