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Technical report TR-47, Center for Computational Research in Economics and Management Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The AI field needs major breakthroughs in its thinking to achieve continuous, sensory-gathered, machine learning from the environment on unlimited subjects. The way motivate such dramatic progress is to articulate and endorse research goals for machine behavior so ambitious that limited-domain, problemsolving knowledge representation methods are disqualified at the outset, thus forcing ourselves to produce valuable new "thoughtware." After exploring why the tendency to associate intelligence with problem-solving may be a mental roadblock to further progress in AI science, some preliminary thinking tools are introduced more suitable for sensory learning machine research. These include lifelong sensorimotor data streams, representation as a symbolic recording process, knowledge transmission, and the totality of knowledge.

Subjects include AI's impact on employment, the AAAI conference, a response to McCarthy's Presidential Message, AI going public, and computerless expert systems.

The initial results from a few AI research projects in statistics have been quite interesting to statisticians: Feasibility demonstration systems have been built at Stanford University, AT-T bell Laboratories, and the University of Edinburgh. Several more design studies have been completed. A conference devoted to expert systems in statistics was sponsored by the Royal Statistical Society. On the other hand, statistic as a domain may be of particular interest to AI researchers, for it offers both tasks well suited to current AI capabilities and tasks requiring development of new AI techniques.

Schlumberger is a large, multinational corporation concerned primarily with the measurement, collection, and interpretation of data. For the past fifty years, most of the activities have been related to hydrocarbon exploration. The efficient location and production of hydrocarbons from an underground formation requires a great deal of knowledge about the formation, ranging in scale from the size and shape of the rock's pore spaces to the size and shape of the entire reservoir. Schlumberger provides its clients with two types of information : measurements, called logs, of the petrophysical properties of the rock around the borehole, such as its electrical, acoustical, and radioactive characteristics; and in terpretations of these logs in terms of geophysical properties such as porosity and mineral composition. Since log interpretation is expert skill, the emergence of expert systems technology prompted Schlumberger's initial interest in Artificial Intelligence. Our first full- scale attempt at a commercial-quality expert system was the Dipmeter Advisor. Following these initial efforts, Schlumberger has expanded its Artificial Intelligence activities, and is now engaged in both basic and applied research in a wide variety of areas.