In Kanal, L. N. and Lemmer, J. F. (Eds.), UAI 2, pp. 137–151. Elsevier/North-Holland.

In AAAI-86, pp. 1041–1045.

Review of Readings in Medical Artificial Intelligence: The First Decade

With the great amount of attention now being paid by the media to AI, it would be naive, shortsighted, and even self-deceptive to think that there will not be public interest in scrutinizing, monitoring, regulating, and even constraining our efforts. What we do can affect people's lives as they understand them. People are going to ask not only what we are doing but also whether it should be done. We should be prepared to participated in open discussion and debate on such ethical issues.

Many of the ideas behind object-oriented programming have roots going back to SIMULA. The first substantial interactive, display-based implementation was the SMALLTALK language. The object-oriented style has often been advocated for simulation programs, systems programming, graphics, and AI programming. It is also related to a line of work in AI on the theory of frames and their implementation in knowledge representation languages such as KRL, KEE, FRL, and UNITS.

The major limitations in building large software have always been (a) its brittleness when confronted by problems that were not foreseen by its builders, and (by the amount of manpower required. The recent history of expert systems, for example highlights how constricting the brittleness and knowledge acquisition bottlenecks are. Moreover, standard software methodology (e.g., working from a detailed "spec") has proven of little use in AI, a field which by definition tackles ill- structured problems. But decades of work on such systems have convinced us that each of these approaches has difficulty "scaling up" for want a substantial base of real world knowledge.

This article explores the implications of one type of cognitive technology, techniques and concepts to develop joint human-machine cognitive systems, for the application of computational technology by examining the joint cognitive system implicit in a hypothetical computer consultant that outputs some form of problem solution. This analysis reveals some of the problems can occur in cognitive system design-e.g., machine control of the interaction, the danger of a responsibility-authority double-bind, and the potentially difficult and unsupported task of filtering poor machine solutions. The result is a challenge for applied cognitive psychology to provide models, data, and techniques to help designers build an effective combination between the human and machine elements of a joint cognitive system.

The major limitations in building large software have always been (a) its brittleness when confronted by problems that were not foreseen by its builders, and (by the amount of manpower required. The recent history of expert systems, for example highlights how constricting the brittleness and knowledge acquisition bottlenecks are. Moreover, standard software methodology (e.g., working from a detailed "spec") has proven of little use in AI, a field which by definition tackles ill- structured problems. How can these bottlenecks be widened? Attractive, elegant answers have included machine learning, automatic programming, and natural language understanding. But decades of work on such systems have convinced us that each of these approaches has difficulty "scaling up" for want a substantial base of real world knowledge.

It is certainly important that this turns Another purpose of the book might be to serve as out to be the correct pairing of adjectives with nouns.

When I wrote that we look for interest,ing articles, I made an exception, namely that we will not accept articles that reviewed or promoted commercial products. I felt that promotional articles were likely to be biased, sales-oriented and/or lacking in technical content. Reviews (particularly unfavorable ones) were bound to be criticized by the vendors as biased, uninformed, cursory, incomplete, etc. I still believe that these would be the results, although I have no evidence to prove it. At our annual AAAI Publications Committee meeting in August, the Committee suggested that I back off from this policy a little bit.