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DPRG: Regarding Expert Systems
Subject: DPRG: Regarding Expert Systems
From: David Martineau
ElectroTX at webtv.net
Date: Mon Jul 19 11:34:53 CDT 1999
FWP,
I beg to diffr with your assumption that any thinking job done by a
man can be done by an approriatly programmed system if the human is
willing to spellout the details... etc., etc.
The best example I can think of, comes from Dr. Asimov's short story
"The Evitable Conflict" Paraphrased in part as follows:
"The cotton industry engages experienced buyers who purchase cotton.
Their procedure is to pull a tuft of cotton out of a random bale of a
lot. They will look at that tuft and feel it, tease it out, listen to
the crackling perhaps as they do so, touch it with their tounge.--and
through this procedure they will determine the class of cotton the bales
represent." DYM: all of these tasks doable by machine... IA: "Now these
buyers cannot yet be replaced by [a] [m]achine." DYM: He's talking at a
period several tech. generations ahead of ours, where computers design
more advanced computers, and so on... IA: "Why not? Surely the data
involved is not too complicated for it?" "Probably not. But what is this
data to which you refer? No textile chemist knows exactly what it is
that the buyers tests when he feels a tuft of cotton. ... .... --Several
dozen items, _subconciously weighed_ out of years of experience. But the
_quantitative_ nature of these tests is not known; maybe even the very
nature of some of them is not known. So we have nothing to feed [a]
[m]achine. _Nor can the buyers explain their own judgement_. They can
only say, 'Well, look at it. Can't you _tell_ it's class-such-and-such?'
" DYM: Some emphasis mine.
The best synopsis of this I can give is that there are thinking jobs out
there that a machine (computer, expert system, etc.) cannot do no matter
how sophisticated its programming or hardware, because man himself does
not know the factors from which he gets his results.
Regards,
- --Electro--
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"Are you telling me, you built a Time
Machine...out of a _DeLorean_?!?!"
- -Marty McFly, Back To The Future, 1985
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