Word: wave
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...second wave had a rocky start. Too often, enthusiastic young computer nerds babbling in technospeak would sell flashy systems to computer-dazzled counterparts in the research divisions of Fortune 500 companies. In turn, the corporate techies built glitzy prototypes that ran on exotic hardware. By the mid-1980s it became clear that both groups had missed the point: big companies did not want sexy technology for its own sake; they wanted solutions to business problems. Consequently, a number of once gung-ho companies began to sour on artificial-intelligence technology as expensive and impractical...
...latecomer to the second wave. It was not until 1984 that Schorr, a respected computer designer within the company, was assigned to take corporate responsibility for artificial-intelligence projects. "Three years ago it became apparent that this technology had gone past the research phase and had become commercial," he recalls. "IBM decided we could make money in it, and that we should be the world leader." Cautiously at first, IBM began to search for opportunities to apply expert systems internally -- for "the low-hanging fruit," as Schorr puts it today...
Growing numbers of U.S. companies are no longer arguing about whether second-wave technology is worth adopting; instead, they are concerned about how best to use it. They are finding all sorts of ingenious applications. United Airlines has developed a simple frame-based system called GADS (Gate- Assignment and Display System) to help prevent the infuriating delays that occur when weather and scheduling problems scramble gate assignments for incoming planes. The system encodes the reasoning that gate controllers use when scheduling gate assignments (for example, two adjacent gates cannot accommodate two DC-10s at once). Before GADS, United's gate...
...military has tapped second-wave technology in its efforts to come to grips with the complexities of modern warfare. The Navy monitors the strategic status of the Pacific fleet with a system that tracks 600 ships, submarines and aircraft and alerts the fleet commander to changes in readiness and the probable impact of those changes. The system analyzes everything that affects readiness, from firepower and fuel consumption to morale (which it estimates by keeping track of the time that has elapsed since a ship's last shore leave). Complex fleet-deployment problems that used to require several days...
Pilots are not the only ones worrying about the reliability of sophisticated military expert systems. Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer turned critic who is now at Stanford, has formed a Palo Alto-based group called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility to oppose the use of second-wave systems in military applications. Winograd believes that isolating experts from the unforeseen consequences of their decisions is "perhaps the most ! subtle and dangerous consequence of the patchwork rationality of present expert systems." He is specifically concerned about the use of expert systems in President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars system...