It is actually very difficult to get corporations to realize that they should invest in learning from their own experiences. Nevertheless, I keep trying and occasionally have success.

Although I have worked with a variety of companies on this issue, in a variety of venues, the major part of my time is spent in the shipping industry where I work with Dimitris Lyras. In addition to being a ship owner he also runs a software company, Ulysses Software that provides intelligent software to the shipping industry. Shipping is a good domain to work in because there is a long history and the roles of the mariners and managers of the mariners are very well defined. There are thousands of stories of what has gone wrong and how to take care of a crisis. Luckily, Mr. Lyras knows a lot of them. We have been working together for over a dozen years and his software has been guided by much of what I wrote in Dynamic Memory.

Currently I am working on building a Reminding Machine that can recognize a situation and respond with relevant stories that can help a user think through a course of action. Of course, the first domain will be shipping.

Imagine 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

The plan starts with a massive attempt at story collection. At some point, when enough stories have been collected and consistent indexing schemes have been developed, it should be possible for the computer to begin indexing stories automatically. We want to reach the point where the computer can tell you a story because it knows what you are trying do and it knows it has something relevant to say just as a village elder might have done in day gone by.

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