...yeah, well I hear that when the CPU goes into sleep mode the mouse is still drawing power and that's the whole battery-life problem right there. I understand they've got a software fix for it that puts the mouse to sleep whenever the CPU is in sleep mode. They call it "mouse mickey."
What?
Is this thing on?
{:-0
Hello out there and welcome to "Swaine's Flames," the Equal Opportunity Monthly Visitor; You Don't Want to Miss It.
Our theme: Is Artificial Intelligence Dead Yet?
Sounds dull, you say? Lame and uninteresting?
Well, yes.
It is, actually.
The fact is, the competition for good themes has been getting pretty heavy since software development became the In Thing. Geraldo's got multithreaded apps all tied up, and Bill Gates refuses to return my calls since his unfortunate experience on the Howard Stern Interview. CNN is changing its format from news to media news. Multimedia, unimedia, it wants to be the media medium. The latest Larry King Live was on tape. You probably caught Ted Koppel's in-depth look at algorithms, Rush Limbaugh's exposé of groupware, or Vladimir Posner putting his Russian spin on RPN. Donahue has jumped on softer software, Maury Povitch has got bugs, and Oprah is all over OOPS.
You get the idea.
What's that?
No, Jon, I don't think I'll tell them the one about David Letterman and late binding. We'll just save that one, okay? Maybe you can use it at Software Development '94. I don't think I could do it justice.
We're_ back. Still here, actually. Didn't go anywhere. And I don't think I can put it off any longer. Next up: Is Artificial Intelligence Dead Yet?
The death of artificial intelligence has been predicted for as long as I've been paying attention, but I've been a skeptic. I always thought that AI would live forever. Now I'm not so sure.
The logic behind my view ran like this: AI will never die because it tackles ill-specified problems that can never be conclusively solved, like speech and handwriting recognition, reasoning, learning, and judgment. Since its problems will never be solved, its grants will never expire and there will always be picking for those who toil in the AI field. Or, AI will never die because its label keeps getting peeled off and affixed to new goods when the old ones spoil.
But I look around me, and I see expert systems and fuzzy logic and neural nets solving real problems. Medical diagnosis, microwave cooking, orange-juice quality control. But the fuzzians and neural netniks and even the expertians seem less willing than past practitioners of the heuristic arts to characterize their magic as artificial intelligence. Even in academia the label seems to be losing its luster.
Is AI dead? I'm a fan, but if the current trend away from using the term continues for another year or two, I'd say AI is kaput. Muerte. Finito.
And there you have it. Dead? Alive? Or in some sloppy limbo that is neither life nor death? You decide. Until next month, for "Swaine's Flames" and Channel Mine this is Mike Swaine saying, Good Night and Good Bytes.
;-]
I can't believe I said "sloppy limbo." You know Rush will count that as an additional mention.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
Copyright © 1993, Dr. Dobb's Journal