Artsat by Richard Kriesche (review)

same essay Dreyfus quotes Marvin Minsky’s deliberationson the subject: ”We still know far too little about the contents and structure of commonsense knowledge. A ‘minimal’ common sense system must ‘know’something about cause-effect, time, purpose, locality , process, and types of knowledge. ... We need serious epistemological research in this area.” Dreyfus responds: “Minsky’snaivete and faith are astonishing. Philosophers from Plato to Husserl, who uncovered all these problems and more, have carried on ‘serious epistemological research ’ in this area for two thousand years without notable success.” He continues : “But Minsky seems oblivious to the hand-waving optimism of his proposal that programmers rush in where philosophers such as Heidegger fear to tread, and simply make explicit the totality of human practices which pervade our lives as water encompasses the life of a fish.” (Quotes are from Herbert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do, Harper, 1979, Revised Edition, p. 3 and p. 36.) The historic importance of Dreyfus’s work should not be underestimated. His humanistic critique of the discipline and of the social function of computer technology preceded by more than a decade other works in a similar spirit, such as Understanding Computers and Cognitionby Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (Addison Wesley), Theodore Roszak’s The Cult oflnformation (Pantheon),andJ.D. Bolter’s Turings’Man (Pelican)-all of which, curiously,were published in 1986. What ComputersJ & l Can’tDo is not a new book, but rather it is the 1979revised edition with a new essay at the front. This introduction has a curious tone that is simultaneously humble and crowing. In the first edition of What Computers Can’tDo, Dreyfus rallied his forces; the second restated the argument with some updating. But the first lines of the new introduction establish that we are looking at A1 as an event of the past. The demise of what he calls the “degeneratingresearch program” of GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) are due (it would seem) precisely to the errors he originally noted. In support of his argument that AI is all but dead, he describes the emergence of alternative approaches, alternatives that tacitly acknowledge the problems inherent to what used to be called Hard AI. These include the connectionist model and neural network (and, one might add, Brooks’s Subsumption Architecture),which sidestep the AI model of topdown, rulebased behavior. Dreyfus acknowledges and discusses perhaps the most ambitious AI project, the last remaining general expert system research project, that of Douglas Lenat. Dreyfus argues that Lenat’s project will fall foul due to precisely the same philosophical dilemmas of previous attempts, though at a somewhat more subtle level. What ComputersCan’tDo is an important book-no education,formal or informal, in the field of Artificial Intelligence is complete and well rounded without the inclusion of this work. For those who have not read the 1979version, What ComputersJtiJ Can’t Do is a must. For those who have, the new essay alone is worth the time. ARTSAT by Richard Kriesche. Kulturdata, Graz, Austria, 1991. Reviewed by SimonPenny, Dept. ofArt, College of FineArts, CarnegieMellon University , 5000Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A. E-mail: . On thefirst day when orbiting the earth each of us pointed down to his own country. On the third orfourth day everyone still pointed down to his continent . Afterwards we looked at the earth only as one total planet. -Cosmonaut Sultan a1Saud, Saudi Arabia So begins ARTSAT, a documentation of the first telematic art event between the earth and an orbiting space vehicle. This event occurred between an Austrian cosmonaut aboard the Russian/ Soviet space station MIR and the artist Richard Kriesche in the Austrian city of Graz, presumably early in 1991 (the text is gloriously vague on this detail). Many of the telematic events that I am familiar with have possessed a brand of global-village,,,techno-utopian rhetoric that, when interrogated, rings fairly hollow. The hollowness arises from tacit assumptions about the universalityof the English language, about access to communications technologies and services in Third-World countries, and in other ways. In ARTSAT the hardware platform (a Russian space station bearing an Austrian Cosmonaut) speaks of a degree of internationalism that renders rhetoric in the work superfluous. This...