Week 9 Readings

I think the following statement more or less summarizes the first paper...

"Social scientists tend to see the process of knowledge acquisition as inherently difficult. In contrast, AI people clearly believe that it can be done much more efficiently and look forward to the day when automation will accomplish this goal."

The author is trying to draw a contrasting point here, but I think is failing. Knowledge acquisition, ie learning, can be done much more efficiently. We just have to be able to get systems (not necessarily computers) to "learn." I think AI researchers would agree this is very difficult and it is something that people have been unsuccessfully trying to accomplish for decades.

Just because AI "people" believe that it can be done more efficiently and in an automated fashion doesn't mean they think it is easy by any stretch of the imagination.

The main focus of this paper seems to be "AI researcher's definition of knowledge and their approach to knowledge acquisition doesn't match mine! (and is probably wrong)." Big surprise. The expert systems of the 80's, which this article is based on, are largely considered failures and modern AI researchers are engaged in relatively if not drastically different approaches today. The date on the paper is 2001, but google seems to imply that the actual text is from 1993. That would make more sense to me.

The second paper made me want to get out my buzzword bingo set. Nevertheless it was relatively interesting. I think the design notebook idea is fairly ingrained with engineering, at least the program I experienced, at this point.

The final paper was quite interesting. I particularly enjoyed the section where the author classified statements made in a paper into 5 distinct types. I found this intriguing.

Nevertheless, I was a little squeamish about the belief that the laboratory was merely a system for literary inscription. I think that is an unfair oversimplification. Unquestionably publishing is a large part of research. However, there is a lot more going on and not all of it will be directly published.

The author seems to state almost with pride "By remaining steadfastly obstinate, our anthropological observer resisted the temptation to be convinced by the facts." I'm still not sure what I think about that.