From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!aunro!ukma!wupost!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!cam Mon Dec 16 11:01:42 EST 1991
Article 2100 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI's Benefits to Humankind
Message-ID: <15920@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 13 Dec 91 12:12:53 GMT
References: <1991Dec13.041332.27509@news.nd.edu>
Organization: Edinburgh University
Lines: 45

In article <1991Dec13.041332.27509@news.nd.edu> jperedo@berlin.helios.nd.edu (jayme peredo) writes (using one carriage return per paragraph):

>How does research and study in the field of Artificial Intelligence 
>benefit humankind?

>Or is research even a matter of human benefit--should we explore AI 
>merely for the sake of knowledge to satisfy our human curiosity?

>Or finally, should the whole idea be scrapped altogether as a 
>waste of our time?

I would like to suggest, with due respect to the sterling efforts of
governments and research funding agencies to divert research into good
channels, that history shows quite clearly that, in general, the kinds
of things people have felt motivated to investigate have turned out to
produce useful knowledge. In other words, I would like to suggest that
evolution has so tuned the human faculty of curiosity as to aim it in
exactly those directions most likely to be of benefit to us. In fact,
one of the dismal truths of mathematics is that no matter how hard the
dedicatedly pure mathematician has tried to concentrate on areas of
mathematical research so pure as to have absolutely no practical
application whatsoever, the dirty-fingernailed applications bastards
have almost always managed to find a use for it. The vain ambitions of
the human ego are simply straws in the great winds of evolutionary
fitness.

If this conjecture is true, then we could make considerable savings in
our national science budgets by sacking nearly everybody in the research
funding agencies, and simply giving no-strings funding to people with a
track record of attracting applause from their peers, raising or
lowering it in (say) annual increments depending on the research
applause meter readings.

Of course this in not the only conjecture which can explain this
tendency for curiosity to be usefully serendipitous. It might be, for
example, that the Universe is simply user-friendly.

In any case, my general point is that the interest in Artificial
Intelligence is ipso facto (given the truth of the above kinds of
conjectures) validation of its probable utility. Of course one can't say
for _certain_, but there's research for you.
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh          +44 (0)31 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205


