Hubert Dreyfus, what computers still can't do: (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992); liii + 354 pages, $13.95

✍ Scribed by John McCarthy

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 610 KB
• Volume: 80
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-3702
• DOI: 10.1016/0004-3702(95)00086-0

✦ Synopsis

Hubert Dreyfus claims that "symbolic AI" is a "degenerating research program", i.e. is not making progress. It's hard to see how he would know, since he makes no claim to have read much of the recent literature.

In defending "symbolic AI", I shall concentrate on just one part of symbolic AI-the logic-based approach. It was first proposed in [7], attracted only intermittent following at first, but has had an increasing number of workers since 1970.' I think other approaches to AI will also eventually succeed, perhaps even connectio'nism. To contradict an earlier Dreyfus metaphor "AI at the Crossroads Again", it isn't a crossroads but a race including logic-based AI, SOAR, connectionism and several other contenders.

How goes the logic-based runner? In fits and starts, as problems are identified and progress made.

Within logic-based AI, I shall emphasize one development-formalized nonmonotonic reasoning, because it illustrates intermittent but definite progress. It was first proposed in [8], gained momentum with the 1980 special issue of Artificial Intelligence, and summarized in the collection [3]. It has continued to develop, see e.g. [6].

Minsky [ll] mentioned the need for something like nonmonotonic reasoning, but used this fact as evidence for the inadequacy of logic-based approaches to AI and the need for approaches not based on logic. This isn't how things have gone. Nonmonotonic reasoning has developed as a branch of mathematical logic, using