The effects of Expert and Allied Systems on information handling: some scenarios

The pioneers of computing, notably Weaver, Booth, Turing and Luhn, were extremely optimistic about the progress they expected to occur in what would now be termed Artificial Intelligence. The implementation of mechanical translation was expected to be rapid, for instance. Judged in terms of this early promise, progress has appeared to be slow and erratic. Exciting individual projects, like Winograd's SHRDLU, have shone out like lighthouses through the gloom only to gradually fade back into the mists. Most progress has been made in restricted fields and there are few signs that significant progress has been, or is being made in tackling the major problem, namely that of designing information systems capable of accommodating the fundamental problem of words having many meanings, and its correlate of identical or similar things being portrayed by a multiplicity of words.