The Role of Intelligent Systems in the National Information Infrastructure

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) will have profound effects on the lives of every citizen. It promises to deliver to people in their homes and offices a vast array of information in many forms, changing the ways in which business is conducted, offering new educational opportunities, bringing geographically dispersed library resources and entertainment materials to everyone's doorstep. It will connect people to people, and help them with their jobs and tasks. For the NII to be useful, however, people will need easy and efficient access to its resources. Today's computers are complex and difficult to use, even for experts. The NII will be orders of magnitude more complex than current systems; it could easily become a labyrinth of databases and services that is inconvenient for experts and inaccessible to many Americans. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can play a pivotal role in meeting major challenges of the NII. AI uses the theoretical and experimental tools of ...