Wednesday, August 14, 2002

"... a major MIT research project called Oxygen, a project aimed at finally creating the kind of interaction between computers and people that we see every summer in Hollywood blockbusters, but never in real life. [...] It's a ferociously complex task, but if they pull it off, the Oxygen team's work could create a vast new market for computer technology, while flinging a lifeline to a moribund computer industry." digitalMASS at bostom.com. The worst kind of tech journalism, mixed with local boosterism. The computer industry is not "moribund," just a bit slower than before. "Ferociously complex" software is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Several of the research directions bundled in this project are interesting and potentially valuable, although not as new as the article implies, but articles of this kind don't do them any favors. Instead, they create expectations that will necessarily be dashed, as the press will be all but too glad to report in the darkest possible hues. Anyone remember the "AI winter"? I don't want a "speech-activated dishwasher," I want a mail client in which I can turn off easily those "helpful" rules that capitalize what it believes are sentence-starting words. Artificial intelligence without design intelligence is stupid and possibly dangerous. 2:51:28 PM