I worked for 25 years in Artificial Intelligence.

In the 60’s I was concerned with getting computers to understand English. In the 70’s I worked on getting computers to have a model of the world based upon knowledge that people have and use that knowledge to comprehend the world around them. In the 80’s I tried to make machines have sophisticated memories about events they had processed and be able to make predictions, recover from failed predictions and generally learn from experience. This became known as the field of Case-Based Reasoning.

Human beings are not rational planners. Decision-making is unconscious and rationalized consciously after a decision has been is made. Cases, known consciously and unconsciously, drive the human decision-making process. Any intelligent computer system that ignores how people make decisions will behave in a fashion that, while logical, may miss the forest for the trees. Real decision making relies on the power of a complex, well-indexed case base.

It is still a kind of AI, but the goal is more modest -- to make computers actually know something important and to be able to provide that information at the time of need.

Well, you wonder, isn’t that nice, but how could an e-mail program be that smart? It would have to know my business inside and out. Right. Why shouldn’t your e-mail program be smart enough to know which e-mails still need to be acted upon, and which present you with a potential legal liability issue simply because you have opened them, and which need to go on to a to do list of some type to be checked on regularly?

Read Why We Hate Email by Roger Schank

Image a beast with eight arms. Now ask yourself whether one arm knows what the other is doing. One hopes that the octopus has a mind which serves as a central processor which can absorb the experience of each arm and track the goals it is pursuing.

The Mind of the Octopus by Roger Schank

Every time I think that e-learning couldn’t get any sillier, someone figures out how to take a really bad idea and promote it into an ideology. At first I didn’t get what anyone could be talking about when they used the phrase “blended learning.” Those awful programmed learning workbook training manuals that everyone hated? Put them online with some cute graphics and presto: e-learning. Yippee!!

Splendid Learning by Roger Schank