The History of Expert Systems
Articles Learning from Artificial Intelligence’s Previous Awakenings: The History of Expert Systems David C. Brock n Much of the contemporary moment’s f it is indeed true that we cannot fully understand our enthusiasms for and commercial inter- present without knowledge of our past, there is perhaps ests in artificial intelligence, specificial- Ino better time than the present to attend to the history of ly machine learning, are prefigured in artificial intelligence. Late 2017 saw Sundar Pichai, the CEO the experience of the artificial intelli- of Google, Inc., opine that “AI is one of the most important gence community concerned with expert systems in the 1970s and 1980s. This things that humanity is working on. It’s more profound than, essay is based on an invited panel on I don’t know, electricity or fire” (Schleifer 2018). Pichai’s the history of expert systems at the notable enthusiasm for, and optimism about, the power of AAAI-17 conference, featuring Ed multilayer neural networks coupled to large data stores is Feigenbaum, Bruce Buchanan, Randall widely shared in technical communities and well beyond. Davis, and Eric Horvitz. It argues that Indeed, the general zeal for such artificial intelligence sys- artifical intelligence communities today tems of the past decade across the academy, business, gov- have much to learn from the way that ernment, and the popular imagination was reflected in a earlier communities grappled with the New York Times Magazine , issues of intelligibility and instrumen- recent article “The Great AI Awak- tality in the study of intelligence. ening” (Lewis-Kraus 2016). Imaginings of our near-future promoted by the World Economic Forum under the banner of a Fourth Industrial Revolution place this “machine learn- ing” at the center of profound changes in economic activity and social life, indeed in the very meaning of what it means to be human (Schwab 2016).
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