n043  1204  01 Aug 83
BC-BOOK-REVIEW Undated
(Eds., please set in italics the boldface words usefulness
and listens in 6th and last grafs.)
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
c. 1983 N.Y. Times News Service
    THE FIFTH GENERATION. Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer
Challenge to the World. By Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck.
275 pages. Illustrated with diagrams. Addison-Wesley. $15.75.
    
    This isn't just another of those books that says Japan is better
than we are and therefore is going to keep on whipping us in
productivity. ''The Fifth Generation'' goes considerably further than
that. It points with a trembling finger at Japan's commitment to
produce within a decade a new generation of computers so immensely
powerful that they will in effect constitute a new and revolutionary
form of wealth.
    KIPS, these computers will be called, an acronym of knowledge
information processing systems. They will exploit the recent
speculation that intelligence, be it real or artificial, doesn't
depend so much on the power to reason as it does on a ''messy bunch
of details, facts, rules of good guessing, rules of good judgment,
and experiential knowledge,'' as the authors put it. They will be so
much more powerful that where today's machines can handle 10,000 to
100,000 logical inferences per second, or LIPS, the next- generation
computer will be capable of 100 million to 1,000 million LIPS.
    These computers, if the Japanese succeed, will be able to interact
with people using natural language, speech and pictures. They'll
transform talk into print and translate one language into another.
Compared to today's machines, they'll be what automobiles are to
bicycles. And because they'll raise knowledge to the status of what
land, labor and capital once were, these machines will become ''an
engine for the new wealth of nations.''
    Will the Japanese really pull this off, despite their supposed
tendency to be ''copycats'' instead of innovators? The authors insist
that this and other stereotypes are largely mythical; that every
great industrial nation must go through a phase of imitation. Sure,
the Japanese can do it. And even if they fail to fulfill their grand
design, they'll likely achieve enough to make it pointless for any
other nation to compete with them. Meanwhile, the United States will
assume the role of ''the first great post-industrial agrarian
society.''
    It's quite an awesome picture that Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela
McCorduck have painted. What's more, they have impressive credentials
- Feigenbaum as professor of computer science at Stanford University
and a founder of TeKnowledge Inc., a pioneer knowledge engineering
company; Mrs. McCorduck as a science-writer who teaches at Columbia
and whose last book was a history of artificial intelligence called
''Machines Who Think.'' And their Jeremiad is extremely well written,
even quite witty in places. It's certainly more articulate by an
order of magnitude than ''In Search of Excellence,'' the book that
defends America's managerial potential and now sits atop the
nonfiction best-seller list.
    So what are we supposed to do in the face of this awesome challenge?
The authors list various possibilities, such as joining up with Japan
or preparing for our future as the world's truck garden. But what
they'd really like to see is ''a national center for knowledge
technology'' - that is, ''a gathering up of all knowledge,'' ''to be
fused, amplified, and distributed, all at orders of magnitude,
difference in cost, speed, volume, and
usefulness over what we have now.''
    Let that be as it may. While ''The Fifth Generation'' makes a
powerful case, there are those who believe that, between the
Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and
several interindustry groups that have been formed, we have already
been sufficiently aroused to compete in this new race for world
leadership. (The Soviet Union, by the way, is out in left field,
according to the authors.)
    Whether the apocalypse it foresees is real or not, ''The Fifth
Generation'' is worthwhile reading. Pamela McCorduck is very good on
the debate over the ability of the machines to think, concluding that
the condemnation they have met has been largely political - amusingly
similar to ''the reasons given in the nineteenth century to explain
why women could never be the intellectual equals of men.'' Feigenbaum
is fascinating on his firsthand impressions of the Japanese computer
establishment. (Each of the co-authors becomes a character in the
narrative when his or her specialty happens to come up.)
    Together they are lucid on what the fifth-generation machines will
be like. And there is the standard mind-bending section on future
computer applications. I particularly like Mrs. McCorduck's vision of
the geriatric robot. ''It isn't hanging about in the hopes of
inheriting your money - nor of course will it slip you a little
something to speed the inevitable. It isn't hanging about because it
can't find work elsewhere. It's there because it's yours. It doesn't
just bathe you and feed you and wheel you out into the sun when you
crave fresh air and a change of scene, though of course it does all
those things. The very best thing about the geriatric robot is that it
listens. 'Tell me again,' it says, 'about how wonderful-
dreadful your children are to you. Tell me again that fascinating
tale of the coup of '63. Tell me again ... ' And it means it.'' f
    
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