Roger Schank was always an interesting speaker: >The third conversation was with Bob Wilensky, a former student of mine, who asked me what I was going to do on

Roger Schank was always an interesting speaker: >The third conversation was with Bob Wilensky, a former student of mine, who asked me what I was going to do on this panel. He asked if I thought doomsday was coming. I said, “Yes.” And he said, “No, you’re wrong.” I asked why. He said, ‘It’s already here. There’s no content in this conference.” Now I think there’s something serious to be concerned about there. He isn’t the only person I’ve heard express that view. If that’s true and there’s no content in this conference, then doomsday is already here. >I got scared when big business started getting into this- Schlumberger, Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, GTE, Amico, Exxon,-they were all making investments- they all have AI group. You start to wonder who could be in the AI groups. We haven’t got that many people in AI. And you find out that, those people weren’t trained in AI. They read an AI book, in many of these cases. They started off reading all the best AI research. After a while you discover AI group after AI group whose people were only peripherally in AI in the first place. What’s going to happen is that those companies will find that their groups aren’t producing as well as they had expected. When they find that, they will complain; they will say nasty things about AI. The presidents of those companies will be talking to the people who are not at ARPA, but at the Secretary of Defense level.