langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-05-02-2

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comment-2002-05-02-2

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 8270 days AGO

Mueller's paper strikes me as a few good ideas carefully hidden in a pile of real junk. Indeed the examples he uses to introduce the idea of `aware' applications seem so absurd on the surface, to me at least, that I might use them as a parody.

It reminds me of a famous performance by Ed Fredkin (It was a long time ago and it could have been Seymour Papert, but I think it was Ed) on a national, popular TV show back in the 1960s. He was invited to explain `Artificial Intelligence'. Remember, back then computers weren't often discussed by `the public' so this was a real chance to `get the word out'.

Instead, he got going on an example of a device which would run around your head and give you a perfect haircut. Yes, the first haircut would cost thousands of dollars, he admitted, but thereafter they would be quite cheap. In any case the example was so ridiculous that the incredulous host (a) could hardly keep a straight face (this was proving MIT professors were, in fact, just as crazy as the public thought them to be); and (b) never got around to _anything_ else. Gave AI a bad name in the public domain for years, if not decades. And, of course, the idea _was_ pretty ridiculous, in and of itself. In the thirty or forty years since we have made some advances in computers, but still nothing along the line he suggested.

Mueller's paper is squarely in this tradition.