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Artificial Intelligence! Software's Corvair and Cold Fusion all in one.
Fred Mikkelsen's Blog |
December 8, 2007 10:16 PM
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Science pretends to be open-minded and look beyond the Public Relations and the Hype to the essence, but it doesn't. I recall the story of John Newland's discovery in the mid-nineteenth century that elements followed the rules of music, and elements, just like notes, have similar tonal er, um, chemical properties every eight notes, um, ... elements.
Laughed at? You bet. The scientists tore him apart so badly that when Dmitri Mendeleev codified the Periodic Table of the Elements, it is said that particular steps had to be made to assure any similarities to that (ha! ha! ha!) Theory of Octaves wouldn't be too obvious.
And, having read this story of Nerd History from long ago, I wondered if this episode set up schools of scientific thought that later would have difficulty accepting spectral analysis, DeBrauligh's theory, relativity, and string theory. Each of these subsequent theories dealves into the wave-like or harmonic properties of matter.
In software, we have the history of Artificial Intelligence. I must disclose right now that my pre-roots are in A.I. My first programming language was LISP. My older brother, Carl, weened me onto software when I was 10 or 11 and to keep me busy when I would visit him at Project MAC, he'd put me up at the card punch machine to write programs, and occasionally, he'd stop hacking (it was a good term then) long enough to run some cards for me and let me debug more.
Along the way, I came to know the giants--Stahlman and Greenblat--though they may not remember me . But A.I. was where I started my trek down computer lane. Quickly, though, I noticed that "A.I." and "Rocket Science" were somehow bad things in the industry. "A.I was hard", and "A.I. 'failed' because there wasn't a killer application that used it."
With programming paradigms based on registries and configuration files, and multi-versioned complex packages, things will proceed more slowly than they could if the industry could re-capture the promise that was A.I. Like the "Theory of Octaves", I know it won't be called "A.I."
I think it will be called Governance.
Governance is the means by which application composition, behavior, and operation are modified by the "environment" in which it is running. As the environment becomes more complex, users will find themselves standing in the Library of Congress with no card catalog staring down stacks and stacks of components and decisions and not knowing which one to take.
Users will want suggestions. Which service provider should I hook up with? Should it be deployed on a VM? or on a remote server? I see A.I. as being key for allowing the Web 2.0 notion of an Ad-Hoc application to be developed without the programmer knowing the nuance of every component API level and component configuration file.
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