Expert Systems

Reflections on Expert Systems

About a week ago I was asked for the right to use a comment I made on expert systems on the I, Cringley Blog. I observed:

Once again we confuse “Expert” with “Expert System”. These two things are almost diametrically opposed.

Experts understand exceptions, learn and focus on the unusual.

Expert Systems codify knowledge and focuses on the common.

In fact the economic incentives for expert systems reward handling the common cases first and returns tend to decrease as the more uncommon cases are added. IBM isn’t reproducing and storing real experts, just finding a way to stamp out repeatable workers and miss labelling them.

This thought developed over a number of years as I hoped between the disciplines of management and computer science and for the sake of completeness I thought to expand upon the idea here. Read More...