[romaniv]

> I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though.

There are wast continents of mostly unexplored or abandoned territory in IT. Moreover, some of them are well documented. Some of them were documented in 1970s. The fact that IT professionals today don't know about them and can't imagine anything more significant than "AI" for pizza ordering, is unsettling. Just to name a few things Alan Kay often talks about:

- Automated system integration or tools for generalized interconnection of applications available to end users.

- WYSIWYG for the Web.

- Constraint-based problem-solvers accessible to mere mortals.

- Agent oriented programming with UI simple enough for normal people to use.

- Dynamic simulations in "normal" software (not CADs)

I am absolutely sickened by the fact that the most common response to this list is "nobody needs this". As far as I'm concerned, each of those things is needed orders of magnitude more than a haircut-scheduling AI.

[swalsh]

You misunderstand what I mean then. I view "AI" as a series of technologies which can be applied to a problem space. You're right in that there is a lot of open problem space, and there's definately a lot of additional technologies which can be discovered in the indivudal categories of technologies. I just don't know what the next "major" category of technology is.

For your example, automated system integration is the combination of existing technologies. That's mostly what I'm implying. We have breadth, now the work is on the depth.

[romaniv]

> automated system integration is the combination of existing technologies.

Which ones? As far as I can see, it's all manual right now. Service integration is probably the largest area of IT at the moment and it sucks in more and more engineers every year. So maybe the notion of "web services" and "APIs" simply aren't the right ways to go about it.