The Dark Ages of AI: A Panel Discussion at AAAI-84

Drew McDermott: In spite of all the commercial hustle and bustle around AI these days, there’s a mood that I’m sure many of you are familiar with of deep unease among AI researchers who have been around more than the last four years or so. This unease is due to the worry that perhaps expectations about AI are too high, and that this will eventually result in disaster. To sketch a worst case scenario, suppose that five years from now the strategic computing initiative collapses miserably as autonomous vehicles fail to roll. The fifth generation turns out not to go anywhere, and the Japanese government immediately gets out of computing. Every startup company fails. Texas Instruments and Schlumberger and all other companies lose interest. And there’s a big backlash so that you can’t get money for anything connected with AI. Everybody hurriedly changes the names of their research projects to something else. This condition, called the “AI Winter” by some, prompted someone to ask me if “nuclear winter” were the situation where funding is cut off for nuclear weapons. So that’s the worst case scenario. I don’t think this scenario is very likely to happen, nor even a milder version of it. But there is nervousness, and I think it is important that, we take steps to make sure the “AI Winter” doesn’t happen-by disciplining ourselves and educating the public. This panel has been assembled to discuss these issues. I’ve asked the panelists to discuss the following questions in particular: Are expectations too high among consumers of AI, such as business and military? If they are too high, then why? Is there something we can do to change this mismatch between expectation and reality? To what extent is this mismatch our fault? There’s a charge often leveled against AI people that they claim too much. To