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THE REAL COMPUTER REVOLUTION

Prof. John McCarthy
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Computer Science Department
Stanford University, California
.end

	I'll begin my talk  about the  computer revolution by saying
that  there has not been any; it is still in  the future. In fact,
while there is a literary  convention  that technology is accelerating
faster and faster  and people are having difficulties adapting to  it,
in terms  of  technology affecting daily life,
there has been a slow down and not a very recent slow down.
In terms of benefits of technology and also in terms of
stressing people's capacity to adapt,
less has
happened  since  World War II than happened say between 1890 and 1920.
We have had nothing that demands as  much adaptation as the automobile
did,  as  the telephone  did, as  having electricity  did,  as  having
domestic refrigeration  did.  It seems to  me this has the paradoxical
effect of promoting anti-technological attitudes  because  the  public
can quite  reasonably ask, "What have they  done  for  us lately"?
Technology has had large recent effects in  increasing prosperity and
increasing  health,  but both  prosperity and health  are  things that
people quite reasonably  take for granted.

      Perhaps  I was expected to speak about  artificial  intelligence
and the social problems it might produce, but I  would like to explain
why I won't.  I think that artificial intelligence,  and by
this I mean intelligence on the human level, is achievable and when it
comes it  will be  more  revolutionary than  any previous  scientific
development, but I also think that I do not know enough  about what it
will really be  like  to say anything sensible about what its  social
effects will  be.  I  thought about it quite a bit, and  I  think  almost
everyone else knows even less than I about it.

	Some people, for example Ed Fredkin of M.I.T and Donald Michie
of Edinburgh University, beat the
drum about the social importance of AI
and hold conferences on "what if" and so
forth. I deplore this and  ask you  to imagine
that someone  had managed in the  last
American  presidential election  or  the  forthcoming one or  in  some
Israeli election to  ask  the leading  candidates  their  positions on
artificial intelligence.  After they finish  saying  "huh?"  and decided
that  there  was  some  possible  advantage in having  a
position, they would turn to some  underling  who  would write
whatever came to his mind and whatever would suit better the  doctrine
of that  party and we would be no better off; it probably would not do
any harm but it might, because who  knows, there might be some law that
would be stupefying in its silliness.  Computer scientists
would at best find themselves in the position of the biologists
regarding recombinant DNA - spending full time explaining why various
proposals would be harmful.

     What I do  want  to  talk about is home  computer  terminals  and
unreconstructed time-sharing and to compare  them with home  computers.
I don't  object  to home  computers,  that  is to  say  having a
terminal  with a  computer in it, but I think  what is happening  with
home computers is what  could  have been expected; most people, even
most scientifically educated people have little
use for  computering per se except perhaps as a hobby.
I have  had  a terminal in
my home  for more  than ten years, and  I use it a lot for
writing books, papers and letters and sending and receiving messages and keeping
up with the news
and occasionally for writing programs. However,
I have  never  written  a  program  that has  anything  to do with  my
domestic life though  I do keep a  few files on hand that are relevant
to that, and sometimes they are helpful if I actually remember to look
at them.  These applications don't require that the terminal have
independent computing capability; mine has, and I haven't used it.
They do require communication capability and the availability of substantial
private and public files on disk.

       Let me  begin by describing some of the things we  have done at
Stanford and  that  have been done at some other places that might  be
relevant to the question of home use of computers.
When we  started our  laboratory  in 1966, we had already  decided
that  documentation was  going  to be  an important use of our computer.
We arranged to
have  a line printer that would print  upper and lower case and a large
character set, which was much more of an  expense  at that time than it
is today.  When the opportunity came around  1970 we planned and built
a  system  which  provided for  a  terminal in each office rather than
terminals in terminal  rooms, and  we arranged  that  the  secretaries
should also have terminals.  I became interested in  home computing
about that time and foresaw a very substantial chicken
and  egg problem, because  the applications  of home computing really
are  communication and data  base applications, and  if you do not have
the data bases then how are you going to demonstrate the applications.

	We finally found one where the necessary data bases are electronically
available, and this is a news service.
the news service.  We have  coming into our computer the news wires of
the Associated Press and  the %2New York Times%1.  Our computer is
connected to the wire just as though it were a teletype in a newspaper
office.
  As each story comes into
the computer,
it is indexed  by all non-trivial words, i.e. all but words like "the"
and "he".
The result is a continuously updated concordance of the day's news
stories.
Each midnight the file of
the day's stories is closed, and we keep two weeks; if we had
more  disk  file we would  keep more.  Aftter the  program user types
NS for "news
service", he can give the program a "key word expression".  Thus
if he were intereseted in Israel but felt he had heard  enough
about Dayan's resignation then he might type  the key word  expression
"israel-dayan" which would give  all stories that
had the word "Israel"  in them  but  did not have the word  "Dayan" in
them.  You  can  make  arbitrarily  complex  Boolean  expressions.
Actually  the data  base is small  enough  so that  false hits do  not
bother you.

	This system is quite crude, but in some respects it compares
favorably with the much more sophisticated %2New York Times%1 Data Bank.
The latter employs human abstractors who make  abstracts of
everything that appears in the %2Times%1 and many other publications
and files them under key words that seem
important to the abstractors
 at the time.  If something becomes  important in retrospect,
for example  the building Watergate,  then you cannot go back  in time
and  say  what stories  mention  Watergate  before the time  it became
important  because  the abstractor didn't then consider  it  important.

	One
can ask NS to be notified when stories
that fit specified key word expression come in.  You get
an announcement if your are logged in and
electronic mail  if  you  are not.
You can also move stories to files
or print them.   This  was one of the few experiments aimed at home
computer use that could done in 1972.

	Our  Dialnet  project is also relevant.
It is a  project for communication  between
computers giving services like those of the ARPANET  to any computer that will
equip itself with a computer operated
telephone dialer and a 1200 baud Bell System
compatible modem and implement the Dialnet protocols.
Given this, a user can transfer a
file between  his computer  and any other computer.  He need only give
the local file name and the foreign file name and then get through
the other computer's password fence.

	It does  require something that one might take  as obvious -
that every computer system have a systemwide naming of files.  However
curiously enough, and this will be my first nibble on a hand that have
been very  generous.    Few if any IBM operating
systems  have  this  elementary
characteristic of having systemwide file names.  What we actually need
and can get by suitable prefexing is world wide file names so that you
can  refer by name  to any  file in the  world -  not necessarily  that
everybody would let you have any file or even admit that it exists.

	Dialnet  is also used to send  computer  mail.  Thus a
computer may  receive a telephone call from another computer in which
it says "I have mail for  your user  named so-and-so", and  of course the
receiving
computer can  reply or  just  hang  up or it can reply that it has no such
user or it can accept the mail.  Perhaps this is the way computer mail
should have  been developed in
the  first place instead of basing an ARPAnet on
leased dedicated facilities.  The standard dial-up telephone network much
more  capability than has been exercised.  For example, it is already
international.

	Another  sort of protoproduct project
is the Common  Business Communication Language.  When I first thought of
it, it didn't seem to have much scientific interest and certainly no
connection with artificial intelligence research.  It seemed to be
just another idea for using computers to increase human productivity.
It  was set  off by
reading a 1965 article about the world of the future.
It was a 1965
model world of the  future, and it  referred to a time when  businesses
would be quite computerised.

	There was  a  scenario in which a clerk in
the  purchasing  department of a company  hears a beep and
turns to  a  display screen that says, "We need 5000 pencils.   Order
them from company B".  She (Sorry Pat, this is a 1965 model
world of the future.)  turns from her terminal
to her  typewriter  and types  out a purchase order  which
is duly sent  to company B where another clerk  turns from her
incoming mail basket to a
terminals and types "Send IBM 5000 pencils".

	We would like to let both
clerks  do something  more  worthy  of  their  talents  and  have  the
computers  communicate  with each other directly.  In order to  do this we
need a standard  business communication language wherein one computer
can call up another and  can say "What is your price  and delivery for
5000 pencils?" and "I hereby  order 5000 pencils" and things like that.
This may  seem like a grubby bit of commercial standardization
of no interest to computer  scientists,
but  in  fact it  raises  all sorts  of interesting
questions.

	One question is how such a system can ever change.
I began to think about this while
visiting a San Diego naval training facility.
There is something called  the fleet data system
whereby every  ship  in  a  fleet would  know about all  of  the
airplanes and ships that any of the  ships  in the fleet had  detected
by exchanging messages. At  the time NATO was
going to join this system and suitable committees had determined  that
the system should be updated or improved at that time and there was to
be a cutover day.   There was  the hope that the Russians would not do
any thing on this cutover day  because things were surely  going to be
in  a great state  of confusion.   Presumably this has happened  by  now,
since the visit was 7 or 8 years ago.  Massive changes on cutover dates are
quite unsatisfactory for large communication and data systems and would
be almost impossible for loosely coupled systems involving tens of
thousands of computers of differing ages, sizes and manufacturers under
no central management.

	Growth requires that when a new kind of message is introduced
message sources begin transmitting both kinds of message.  When enough
new style messages are being transmitted, receivers begin using them.
When no-one requires old style messages, their transmission may stop.

	Another design idea is that each message should be a
list, and every item should be a either an
atom or a list whose first item
designates  what  kind of a thing the list represents.
You may have heard of  such
lists; they begin and end with parentheses.   Remember that
only computers get to see them.

	Another characteristic was suggested
in N.  Chomsky's book %2Reflections on Language%1; he claims that human
languages have it, other linguists dispute it, but anyway we want it for
our Common Business Communication Language.  It is that the  syntax
never requires an atom at
any place.  For  example, if a  price is to be designated then of course
$3.12  is a  reasonable  thing to  appear as a list item,  but any
expression designating a  price should also  be allowed,  such as
translations of %2"the same price as last week"%1 or %2"in accordance with
our contract"%1 or %2"the price granted to the most favored customer"%1
or whatever.

	When I tried to specify a simple version of a CBCL that would
be expandable, I found substantial
difficulties which led to some interesting scientific problems.  Consider
designing how delivery is specified.  First, the conditions might be
unspecified, meaning  that the delivery conditions are
standard, or it might  say %2"the best way"%1.  However, if you want
to elaborate what is really to  be allowed in delivery specifications,
there  are  all
kinds of  conditional specifications such as %2"to  be sent  by 
 Federal  Express
unless they are  on strike,  in which case it goes  by post  office"%1 or
vice versa.  It turns out that a substantial and interesting part of
the ⊗semantics of natural language is involved in formalizing what one
business computer might say to another.

	This is interesting from a scientific point
of  view, because  interest  in computational  linguistics  has  mainly
focused on the syntax of language.  Here is a case where we are going
to use  a perfectly rigid syntax decided in advance, but we have all
the semantic  problems of deciding exactly  what so you want one computer
 to be able to say to another.
This has led me to the belief that putting English language "front ends"
on programs that  basically  speak  in  "computerese"
may miss the point scientifically, because more interesting than
how to say in  natural language what we already say in
various computer input-output  jargons,  is how to make the computer say
things said in
natural language that  we do  not presently know how to make computers
say at all.

     This was by  way of an advertisement  for  the scientific
interest of some of these problems.  Another important feature
of our environment is
the mail system that permits sending electronic  mail all over
the  ARPANET  and to other places.  I  certainly have gotten  into the
state where I divide the world into two classes of  people -
those to whom I can send ARPANET mail and those with whom I have to rely
upon more ordinary kinds of communication.  I think I will not sing my
song about  why  it  is  often better than telephoning and things like
that. I will say that I suspect that IBM may have  gone into some kind
of blind  alley if  they  suppose that  the speech  filing system will
obviate the need for written electronic mail facilities for everybody -
even executives - who  can type as well as engineers
when  they have the motivation - and
under certain circumstances, I believe they will.

     I would like to do as  the other speakers have done and talk about social
effects,  but  I want to  express the opinion that much of the talk
about the effects of technology has been harmful and even immoral.
I believe  that people  should be cautious
about  talking about  social  effects, especially about  talking about
planning desirable social effects and planning that undesirable social
effects  should be avoided.  The danger is that  this  will
come down to planning other people's  lives for them,  and it seems
to me  that this disease afflicts many of those
Americans who refer to themselves as the  "%2public policy
community"%1. 

	In
particular, I doubt the virtue of the Office  of Technology  Assessment
which Congress created to advise about the consequences of new technology.
Its attitude seems to be %2"Don't do anything new without consulting us, and our
new director will take  office in a few months, and we will be able to
consider  these things when we have decided in what  order to start to
consider them"%1.

	Let me  put  it this  way: hardly any technology has
specific
 social effects, good  or bad; what technology  does  is  provide
opportunities.  Some  people can  use these opportunities to do things
that will  turn out to be good  and other  people  can  use them to do
things that turn  out to be harmful.  Which  you emphasize
depends  less on specific technologies than on  how you
look at people  and institutions and the  ways they can be
expected to use any opportunity. 

You say that  if we give them  the  chance
they are sure to abuse it, and you can have two kinds of worry: one is
what they will do to each other and the other is what they will  do to
themselves.

	Some people  worry that if people  have  too much  access  to
computer files they will waste their time or if they have time-sharing
they  will try  out  programs  without  adequately thinking.  They are
really all out to help each other by disciplining each other.  Dijkstra's
book %2"A  Discipline of Programming"%1 suggests to me
a book jacket picture of  someone
standing on a dais with  a whip menacing a crowd of half-naked programmers
at computer terminals.  So if
you want discpline, put an ad in the %2Berkeley Barb%1.

	My idea of social consciousness is different, and instead of
inventing ways in which things might go wrong, I would like to discuss
some useful opportunities.  After all, the probability that an opportunity
will be missed is far greater than the probability that an unfortunate
aspect of an application will go unnoticed.

	For some years now, disk storage has been cheap enough so that
it has been economical to have a national library in which everything
that has been written is stored on disk and available from a terminal
anywhere in a country or even in the world.  Such a file would be the
effective equivalent of a very large number of copies of the book.
Recently it has become cheaper to store even a single copy on disk
than on a library shelf - counting the cost of the library, staffing
it, cataloging the book and the cost of the book itself.  Rumor has
it that IBM can make disk files of more than six times the density
of the current best that would cost little more to produce.  Our
society has suffered from missing the 1970 opportunity to create
such a library, and the blame for this belongs mainly to the technology
assessors, whose imaginations extend only to what may go wrong
with new technology.

	The simple convenience
of having everything in the Library of Congress immediately available
is important in itself; much misinformation would be avoided if such
facts as are available could be easily looked up.  However, its effect
on the future of publication is sociologically even more interesting.
If all publication is available via terminals from disk file,
then publication consists merely of declaring public a file that
you  have put into the system.  In order to get anybody to
read it you  have  to get it to  his  attention, and since we can't suppose
that people will read more than now, this will continue
to be complicated and uncertain.  As now, some people  will  read
files constituting  book reviews, and  the reviewers will  review what
books  they  would consider  worthwhile,  and  so forth.
People who
write something  eccentric or not  of much  interest to other
people will have as much trouble getting their stuff read under a new
system as they do now.

	The important fact is that such a  system will  make the writers,
especially the well known  ones, substantially independent of  publishers. The
cost of getting a book out for a reader is now something like  between
10α% and  20α% to the writer and 80α% printing and distribution costs, and
these numbers  can easily be reversed.  I think  this would make for
fewer fads  and it would also have the important social effect  that a
smaller public would  be  needed in order   to support someone  who is
writing because he could get his income with  roughly one-fifth of the
number of readers that he presently needs.  Another aspect is that much
more detailed information would be available for those who want it.

      When we first put the  Associated Press into our computer I  had
this  hope that there must be  all these great stories that the AP put
out that  the newspapers  don't  print, but of course that  was a dumb
idea. AP is a co-op of newspapers and it  is not going to put  out  any
stories that the newspapers aren't likely  to  print. So it  turns out
really  shallow, and if  you consider the  AP correspondent  in a place
like Moscow or Peking or Jerusalem,
you must say that he must get a bit bored with
his job. because he  writes the much same thing every day, and he does  not
write very much. It is just packaged in what a newspaper is likely  to
print.

     Another  desirable  social effect of on-line publication
is to  make  an  effective
right of reply.  Politicians and journalists often engage in hit-and-run
controversy, in what he says or writes
depends to a  large extent  for its effect on the fact that people who
disagree with  it or the people who are specifically attacked will not
be able to  mount an instant reply.  With the on-line system, if you  read
(say) an attack on the "Eastern Establishment" by
a Republican President,
then you  could ask your terminal %2"What do the Democrats reply to
that?"%1.  I think this
would enhance  the quality of debate which has greatly declined in the
United States at least in the past 100 years.  If you read even part of
the  Lincoln-Douglas  debates  you  discover  that  one of  them could
propound to the  other a very complex hypothetical question about what
the country should  do  "if" and  the other would actually  feel
obliged to answer.  That certainly has not happened at all recently.

      The third aspect of such a new system which I consider desirable
is that  it  would enhance  the ability  of a  group  to maintain  its
separateness if it  so desires.  They could  be physically scattered but
intellectually much closer together; the cost of having a newspaper or
magazine or whatever kind of communication seemed  best to  them would
be greatly reduced from what it is now.
*
	Now I want to  finish off  by giving some advice, unsolicited of
course. We will give this advice to three entities, the first of which
is  IBM  which  has generously  supported  this  symposium. The  first
question is when are they going to give up the punch card check? But I
have already asked that. I think one  of the  key requirements for the
near future  is good time  sharing, and my  past  experience with  IBM
systems has confirmed my prejudices that it is not up to  the state of
the art in its  complexity in  its terminals, etc. I don't want to  go
into that right now; if they ask me I will tell them.

     There is another  aspect that is interesting, and that  has to do
with an example that Lewis Branscomb gave this morning. that has to do
with  on-line  application  that  was   interrupted   for  some  batch
processing. If there  is any technology trade off which has  a  social
impact it is the distinction between batch and on-line processing. One
can say that  whatever they did do, updating this data base with batch
processing  should have been done on-line, but in some sense one could
claim that batch processing has been responsible for many of the evils
that  have  been ascribed to computers. If the information  is sitting
there on  a shelf on a tape and somebody asks a question, you can't do
anything about that until  the  next time you run the data through. In
many cases  you can't  do anything about it period except run over the
documents. Whereas if you are running  on a time sharing  load you can
at least answer the question as to what is in the data base  and maybe
even change it.

       It  seems  to  me that  one  kind  of  system  which  should be
considered  for the next  ten years are  systems in which the customer
has direct access to  at  least  part  of the  data  base  so that the
customer who has a terminal can find the state of  his account even at
2:00  in the morning, if  that's  what he  feels  like  doing, with of
course suitable handling and safe guards of  one kind or  another. For
example, the worst safe guard  would be if  you really don't care that
people are looking  where you  have  been  and  this is  rather  easy;
otherwise  you can ask for any degree of security that you desire  and
pay for it, either in money or lack of access for yourself. I consider
the 360 to have been somewhat of a tragedy; it was almost given up for
time sharing but not quite.

      Now I want to  give  some  advice  to governments. One  piece of
advice to  the US  government: there is all  this information that  is
supposed to be available according  to Freedom of Information, but  of
course it is sitting in libraries or reading  rooms in  the  agencies.
While one is prodding the government to do something maybe one  should
require that all of this  information should be available on-line on a
terminal anywhere in the country.

     I have talked enough, so I will skip the rest of my advice.

 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS FOLLOWING PRESENTATION:

J. Raviv:

     John McCarthy said that he  didn't want to talk about  artificial
intelligence, but I don't think we should  let  him  off so  easily. I
would like to ask the following question:      There has been a lot of
research  going  on in  artificial  intelligence  and on  robotics  at
Stanford under your direction at SRI  and at MIT.  I  was wondering if
you could  summarize what  some  of  the  benefits  are  that we  have
obtained  from  this research  but  not  to  direct the answer towards
industrial robots because this is not  the same kind of  sophisticated
work that you are leading. What is  the benefit  to our profession and
to man and society, either right now or in the future?

 J. McCarthy:

     I  think  the practical benefits  today  have been minimal. There
have  certainly   been   many  beneficial  by-products  of  artificial
intelligence,  for example, time  sharing, maxima, etc., but I believe
that artifical  intelligence  is in a basic  research stage  and  will
remain in  that stage quite a long time to come. There  are people who
are  saying  that  since  it  has  not  produced any  great  practical
importance in twenty years  we  should  stop. Should we have said that
about genetics twenty years after Gregor Mendel, which would have been
actually before the subject got started. One  slogan which I put forth
on that is that for artifical intelligence to reach a human level will
require 1.7 Einsteins and .3 of the Manhattan Project, and it would be
best to have  the Einstein before the Manhattan  Project. I think that
artificial  intelligence  has already  had  some  scientific and  some
philosophical benefits. The scientific benefits are that the cognitive
approach to psychology has been  an outgrowth  of work  in  artificial
intelligence, although the main contributors  to this area, Newell and
Simon of  the Carnegie-Mellon  group, have been interested in both all
along. This has  really  demolished  behaviorism as the  paradigm  for
psychology,  and  this  demolition  was  something  that  was  clearly
required  for  progress.  The same  thing is  true,  even  though  the
prospect achievabless advanced, in  philosophy in that there were many
forms of philosophy in empiricism and  positivism, etc. that were akin
to  behaviorism  in methodology and  which  have now given way to  the
willingness of philosophers to  understand that if you really want  to
understand thought or belief or  something  like that then you have to
admit rather complex mechanisms.  Now as to one potential benefit that
I  see in  the offing, this is a bit of mathematical  empirialism, why
can't we in society do the right thing by establishing the basic facts
as  axioms of  a theory  and deducing that  a certain course of action
will  have desirable  results. We could end  the  controversy  because
everyone could examine the basis for these axioms and decide that they
agree with them  and  examine the  proof  that  the desired  course of
action would have good results, and then we would not be squabbling so
much.

      Now this goal of a scientific approach to social problems is one
which requires an  enormous advance  in our ability to formulate facts
about the world before it becomes even remotely feasible. It has a bad
name because  it is very easy  to claim that  you already have it, and
you  can  put  people  in  jail  who  claim  that your  theory is  not
scientific;  then it gives you a good  way for convincing a reasonable
fraction  of  the  world's   population  that  such  a  way  has  been
discovered. But  it does  depend on  the ability to put  opponents  in
jail.

 M. Rabin:

     Would you care to  comment  on the  various programming languages
which  arose out  of the artificial intelligence effort,  the  various
capabilities and  flexibility  that  is afforded  to use through these
languages and would you say, in your opinion, does this  get us closer
to  the  solution   of   the   problem  of  making  the   man  machine
communication, that the first speakers spoke about, easier?

J. McCarthy:

     LISP   was   the  first  language   oriented   toward  artificial
intelligence  and it had no  competitor that survived at all for maybe
seven or eight years. Then we had MICROPLANNER, and  then there were a
quick succession of such languages that killed each other off.  I kind
of  liked  MICROPLANNER;  I thought  that  in  many respects it was an
improvement  on LISP, but  then things got very complicated and people
went back to programming in raw LISP.

     The systems which are combined data bases and languages like KRL,
in my opinion, suffer from  technical  deficiencies; there is too much
based on  Minsky's  frame paradigm  and Shank's script.  I don't think
that languages are  artificial  intelligence per se and nor do I think
that all communication with computers  has to be  in natural language.
To some extent one could say they used to try this out on  ARPA. It is
indeed possible  to program a computer in English; it is also possible
to make an airplane that is controlled  by whip and spurs, but it  may
not be equally desirable.

J. Raviv:

     There  is a friend  of mine who  worked in an  area of artificial
intelligence,  and I asked him in  1964 what he  thought would happen,
what are  the hopes,  the practical  applications. He said that in ten
years there will  be a  robot  delivering mail.  He didn't  mean  in a
hospital or something that is happening now,  but like delivering mail
in the suburbs. Was a statement like that irresponsible on his side or
was there a hope  of sorts or have things changed?

 J. McCarthy:

     I  don't think  the  statement  was  irresponsible if  it  wasn't
irresponsibly made. Namely, if  someone asks you  how  long  something
will take, one way of doing  it is adding up the time  you imagine  it
will take to  overcome the difficulties  you recognize.  If it happens
there are unrecognized difficulties or if it happens that your idea of
what  is required  is mistaken, then you will come  up  with incorrect
estimates.  I  will admit  that  I  expected greater  progress in  the
robotics area  than has occurred. When we first started our project in
1965  I thought we would have programs  and  that we  would be able to
assemble a heathkit out  of parts in a couple  of years. Part  of  the
reason that we aren't here yet is that  the problem was more difficult
than I  expected. But another part was that I didn't understand what I
read somewhere  that  it  takes ten  years  to  develop  a  scientific
laboratory. It  is really true in this  area  that there are  only now
beginning to be people who  are really professional in robotics. There
were  dilettantes  like me  who  had  ideas  in the field but were not
totally  committed  to it, and there were people who  had disliked the
previous branches of science they had tried and very often they turned
out to dislike robotics also. Now we are beginning to get some sort of
core of professionals in the field, and maybe progress will be  faster
now.  As  I  said  in  my  lecture  in  Jerusalem  there is  too  much
concentration now on short range demonstration projects. In some sense
there  is  less thinking about basic scientific problems of heuristics
and  epistomology than  there was  in  the late  50's when  artificial
intelligence first got started. I think this has to be reversed.

 P. Goldberg:

     To  what extent  do you think  that  this problem which you  just
described stems from the fact that  there are  too  many people in the
field which is not ready for that assault?

J. McCarthy:

     I don't  know.  It is hard for me to see that there are too  many
relative to other  fields.  There  is no  reason  why all  those smart
people could not do better if they would only listen to me.