[ethbro]

Don't think you deserve to be down voted for asking a reasonable question.

A) Most of the documentation is on the other side of the digital event horizon (so pre-1995).

B) I break apart knowledge about AI (that is, the mathematical and systems discoveries) and AI as a product. The assertion is not that the knowledge failed, but that the product failed.

As you pointed out, the math behind expert systems was solid and functional for certain problems. But the collapse of the product (aided by the popular science press researcher-hunting for whoever would promise the most outlandish things for them) broke the funding channel for anything labelled AI.

As a result, methods used by expert systems lived on and solved problems, but nobody could call it AI because conventional wisdom knew that "AI was a failure."

[ghaff]

One of the big things that eventually changed was data--the availability of lots of data and the capability to transmit, store, and process it relatively economically. As I remember a lot of the late-80s, early-90s AI efforts, there was a lot of focus on encoding the world and the rules associated with it manually. Effectively, scaling out the knowledge of experts by embedding it in computers.

I actually wonder if we're swinging too far in the opposite direction of data vs. "understanding" the world. It may turn out that we can make some things pretty good using ML but not the last 5% needed to make them truly usable.

[yourapostasy]

> I actually wonder if we're swinging too far in the opposite direction of data vs. "understanding" the world. It may turn out that we can make some things pretty good using ML but not the last 5% needed to make them truly usable.

Interesting hypothesis, care to expand your thoughts?

Are you saying something along the lines that our current ML techniques builds an initial raw decision with statistically-based reasoning, that usually works 95% of the time (Metzinger's "sentience"), but to solve the remaining 5% of edge cases, we need to build more reasoning-style decision-making (Metzinger's "intelligence")? Metzinger is covered by Peter Watts [1], jump to the "Sentience/Intelligence" section.

[1] http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#Notes

[kobeya]

And also the wealth of venture capital that existed in the 1980's to fund AI dried up and from ~90 to ten years ago it was nearly impossible to get significant startup funding for an AI play, despite the epic influx of capital in the 90's. AI missed out entirely on the dotcom years.