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From AP Newsfeatures
(APN SUNDAY ILLUSTRATIONS: Mailed print subscribers get 1 drawing, 2
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    EDITOR'S NOTE - Machines may never be able to make a moral judgment
or paint a masterpiece or compose a symphony, but computers today are
getting smart enough to make decisions once left to humans. It gives
you something to think about, as this report attests.
    
By SUZANNE WETLAUFER
Associated Press Writer
    CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - Three decades after a handful of engineers
at MIT began the quest for a computer that could think like a human
being, ''smart'' machines have emerged from the realm of fantasy into
the American marketplace.
    Experts in the field say talking cameras, intelligent ovens and
emotional computers capable of anger and ambition can no longer be
pooh-poohed as the stuff of science fiction.
    ''There is no reason to think any of those things are impossible,''
says Marvin Minsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and an expert on artificial intelligence, as the field is
known. ''It's just a matter of time.''
    Today, ''thinking'' computers - that is, machines that can imitate
the way the human brain reasons - comprise a $250 million-a-year
business in the United States. Based on a recent study, Arthur D.
Little Inc. estimates that figure will jump to $126 billion by the
year 2005, and that machines with electronic brains will be a part of
almost every car, home and office.
    ''Ten years ago, this whole field was out there in the cold, in the
woodshed, with researchers begging for grants,'' says Philip Cooper,
chairman of Palladian Software Inc., a burgeoning artificial
intelligence company. ''Now, artificial intelligence is being used,
commercially, for the very first time.
    ''It is still quite primitive. It is not divinity in a box. But it's
pointing at what's coming down the road.''
    Cooper should know. His Cambridge-based company has just introduced
a $95,000 computer software program called ''Financial Advisor,''
which the company says has the analytic abilities of many high-priced
MBAs.
    Using the Advisor requires no special skills, Cooper says. All a
user needs to do is supply the machine with information - reams of
it, in some cases - about a company and its plans, say, to build a
new plant, introduce a product or invest in a risky prospect.
    The program, written by eight Ph.D.s from MIT's Sloan School of
Management, is not without a sense of humor. ''Do you believe your
product enjoys a competitive advantage others do not?'' it queries
users considering a new market entry. If the answer is yes, the
computer screen flashes with the question, ''Shall I tell you about
Japan and Taiwan?''
    After all the information has been fed into the computer, it
tabulates it, analyzes it, makes graphs, factors in inflation, taxes
and other economic elements and then makes recommendations about a
course of action.
    ''What it cannot do is make the decision,'' says Cooper. ''That's
what the manager must do. This won't replace people. It's a tool to
free managers to use their talents for more creative tasks.''
    The Palladian program, like other artificial intelligence machinery,
is different from an ordinary computer because it digests information
with an enormously complicated language called LISP.
    LISP computes symbols rather than numbers and letters and is
punctuated with parentheses, leading industry insiders to joke that
LISP stands for ''lots of idiotic stupid parentheses.'' It actually
is a contraction of List Processing.
    The Financial Advisor's potential has made believers - and buyers -
out of 25 major American companies, including Coopers & Lybrand,
Texas Instruments and Ryder Systems Inc.
    'It's like having a team of experts at your disposal,'' says Michael
Gilboy, director of strategic business planning at Coopers & Lybrand,
a large public accounting firm based in New York. ''It answers some
questions I wouldn't even have thought of asking.
    ''When I give it a problem, I don't have to worry if it handled the
tax treatment right or depreciation correctly,'' Gilboy adds. ''I
think it could replace an MBA. . .why not?''
    Cooper, a 34-year-old airplane enthusiast who once worked for a
large Madison Avenue advertising firm, started Palladian two years
ago with financial backing from the Rockefeller family. It was his
second high-technology venture.
    Before 1980, Cooper had no knowledge of computers, just a desire to
make a machine that could display high-quality color graphics. With
$400 in savings, he began Computer Pictures Corp. Two years later, he
sold the company to Cullinet Software for $14 million.
    ''I didn't know how much I didn't know, or else I wouldn't have done
it,'' Cooper says with a laugh. ''I just figured if I could fly, I
could learn to work computers.''
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.: work computers.''
    Recently, Cooper started a scholarship fund at Boston College in
honor of the two professors who introduced him to computer science.
    Although Palladian is selling corporations the first commercial
application of artificial intelligence, about 600 others, many of
them 10 or 15-person operations, are developing custom-made
''thinking'' computers for individual clients and companies.
    Ford Motor Co., for example, recently signed a $14 million agreement
with Carnegie Group Inc. of Pittsburgh and Inference Corp. of Los
Angeles for development of computer programs that will be able to
approve credit applications and diagnose brake systems.
    Westinghouse Electric Corp. uses an artificial intelligence system
to monitor steam turbines, alerting managers when something is going
wrong and suggesting solutions.
    And the Artificial Intelligence Applications Center at Arthur D.
Little, an international consulting firm based here, is working on a
computer for NASA that might be able to predict and analyze tornadoes
three hours before they strike.
    It is also developing a program called ''Trader's Assistant,'' which
will help brokers assess the stock market, taking into account the
instantaneous supply and demand of stock, as well as the significance
of trading-room rumors and hearsay.
    ''Lately we've had a lot of people coming to us and saying, 'Hey,
what's artificial intelligence? We have to get involved in it,' ''
says Marla E. McDonald, an AI specialist at Arthur D. Little.
    Miss McDonald said the company has decided to leave behind the
''what-if'' side of artificial intelligence to create systems that
people can actually use to resolve workaday problems.
    ''We are very application-conscious,'' she says. ''We won't research
AI just for AI's sake.''
    The message is similar at Symbolics, at five years old the rich
grandfather of the artificial intelligence industry with sales of $69
million in its 1985 fiscal year.
    About 30 percent of Symbolics' business is for the Defense
Department, the Pentagon and NASA, but most of its customers are
Fortune 500 industrial companies, such as General Electric Co., Bell
Labs and Honeywell Inc.
    ''There is no question that most of our customers are still in the
development stage,'' says Nan Boyd DuCharme, head of investor
relations for Symbolics. 'But this was the year. . .we began to see
some practical applications.''
    Palladian's new software, she added, ''was a breakthrough. . .it
brought artificial intelligence to the common man.''
    With the growing presence of ''thinking'' computers, research has
moved from the back laboratories where it began to well-financed
scientific centers. Last October, for instance, the University of
Illinois said it would build a $50 million institute devoted to the
processes of the human brain and how they apply to computers.
    At the same time, the government is spending $600 million to develop
''smart'' weapons systems, including an unmanned robot tank that can
''see'' with a television camera in order to navigate across
battlefields.
    Experts inside the AI industry note with some consternation that the
general public still fears the notion of computers that have the
ability to reason.
    ''Companies don't want their clients to know they use artificial
intelligence,'' says Miss McDonald. ''They are afraid somehow the
public will think there is a Wizard of Oz pulling the strings.
    ''People have a vision of Star Wars, of a computer running wild, of
computers being able to reproduce themselves and rule the world. They
have a vision of comic book and cartoon concepts they have built up
over the past 30 years.''
    Miss McDonald and many others find the idea of these ''cartoon
concepts'' absurd, but MIT's Minsky, considered the founding father
of AI, thinks the door to the future has opened wide enough to prove
anything is possible.
    He predicts machines will be able to be programmed for feelings like
love, fear, hatred and ambition.
    ''I recommend fear,'' he said. ''If the chimps had known about
people, they would have feared them, too.''
    Cooper's vision of future machines is less threatening.
    Computers, he says, ''probably will never be able to be original.
They will never make a moral judgment or be artistic or musical or
creative. That will always be the difference between people and
machines.
    ''But the more machines free people from the more routine kinds of
intelligence, the more it frees them to do the original and creative
thinking that pushes mankind forward.''
    END ADV
 
 
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