SPIELBERG'S AI MOVIE MAY GLIMPSE THE FUTURE,
BUT WE'RE NO WAY NEAR THERE YET!

16 October 2001

Don't expect to see a machine with human-like intelligence anywhere in the near future, according to Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Curt Hall, who is part of Cutter's Business Intelligence Practice.

"Researchers today could fill the Empire State Building with computers and software and still could not make an artificially intelligent machine that possesses even a comparable level of intelligence to that of the average human being," says Hall. "But, this does not mean that the field of AI is a failure."

Cutter's Hall says that currently, commercial software developers are applying AI techniques to handle tasks that are either beyond human capability or are too routine or too costly for humans to perform. They include: information content filtering and classification, data mining, automated loan approval, complex scheduling, and fraud detection.

Hall believes developers will continue to make AI part of their products and companies will see the greatest benefit in the following areas:

1. Information/document management
2. Knowledge management
3. Business intelligence
4. Customer service and marketing
5. Speech recognition systems

"If research leads to the development of successful new modeling techniques that can carry out new and better forms of information processing, no one will really care if they do not exactly mimic the functionality of the human brain," concludes Hall. "I honestly doubt you'll find too many people today who are upset that the wings on an aircraft do not flap like those of a bird or that a submarine does not swim exactly like a fish."

--Cutter Consortium

[These statistics were taken from Cutter Consortium's Business Intelligence Advisory Service. For more information, please contact Dennis Crowley at +1 781 641 5125 or +1 800 964 5125 or e-mail dcrowley@cutter.com or visit http://www.cutter.com/consortium/index_bi.html.]