From: chandra@cannelloni.cis.ohio-state.edu (B Chandrasekaran)
Subject: Re: Colbys-Weizenbaum and Overcoming Depression 2.0
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept. of Computer and Info. Science
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 16:33:29 GMT

In article <C0o16u.49F@cs.bham.ac.uk> axs@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) writes:
>
>> Date: 9 Jan 93 17:36:13 GMT
>> Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest)
>>
>>       It seems a bit much for a system with no capability for living in the
>> real world to issue advice on how to do so.
>>
>> 					John Nagle
>
>I can't see why people make such a fuss about expert systems giving
>psychiatric or any other kind of advice. They don't make a similar
>fuss about *books* giving the advice, and there are plenty of those.
>(E.g. there's lots of advice in books on how to bring up children
>for example, but no book has lived in the real world or brought up a
>child.)
>
>In both cases all that is happening is that information and advice
>has been compiled and presented to readers or users, and sometimes
>it will be good advice and sometimes not so good, or possibly even
>bad.
>
>The difference is simply that when the information is presented in
>the form of an expert system, finding the relevant advice is far
>more convenient than searching through tables of contents or indexes
>of books.
>
>That's similar to the reason I'd rather get email than paper
>letters: using simple string searching routines (grep) I can get the
>machine to find who wrote what to me when in a fraction of the time
>that it takes me to do the same with paper mail in my filing
>cabinet.
>
>An expert system is marginally more sophisticated than that.
>
>Of course, if the expert system purports to be doing any more than
>effectly expressing opinions of its authors, or consequences of
>opinions of its authors, then there's some misrepresentation going
>on, and legal action should be taken when harmful consequences
>follow.
>
>But that's no different from a book on how to deal with depression
>that makes false claims about how successful its techniques are.
>
>When the advice is given not by an AI package of the sort that's
>generally available now, but by an autonomous artificial agent, with
>its own sources of motivation, which has distilled generalisations
>and advice from years of experience of interacting with people in
>trouble then we'll have something qualitatively different.
>
>It will take many years before there are convincing examples of
>this, though intermediate cases (semi-autonomous machines) may come
>earlier.
>
>In the mean time we are talking only about "interactive" documents,
>so why make a fuss about them?
>
>Aaron
>-- 

i. John Nagles's comment needs to be rebutted directly, I think. It is
not obvious that advice can or should only be given by some entity that
has experienced certain things.  The computer in front of the Hertz
rental counter gives you advice about how to reach your destination:
it has a map, knowledge about the desirability of various routes, and
a problem solving method that enables it to produce that advice.  While
that advice is not fool-proof, it is not obvious that we should reject
the output solely for the reason that the program is not a regular driver
on the local roads.  Similarly, it is conceivable that a computer
program might have knowledge about the relations between various symptoms
and causes, and moght also have encoded knowledge about what sorts of
actions might be helpful.  This seems like "advice" to me, and  a perfectly
reasonable way to make knowledge more widely available, as long as 
caveats of various sorts are made and understood.

ii. Expert systems are not "mere" interactive retrievers, as Aaron
seems to say.  They not only can select (retrieve) knowledge that is
potentially relevant to the given situation, can apply it to the
situation, produce additional knowledge that is not explicitly in the
book, and repeat this cycle a few times.  Of course it is ultimately
"mere" something or other, but it certainly increases the useful of
knowledge far beyond just retrieval.  

iii.  The problem with the electronic shrink is how it is presented.
If the reason to use it is to give emotional comfort to the patient by
implying that there is an agent in the computer that "cares" about the
patient, or that the designers of the program (say, the Colbys) "care"
about the patient (the individual patient, not patients in general), I
think such use may be fair game for criticism.  If, however, the
shrink is used as a device by which relevant knowledge can be brought
to bear on the patient's situation, an analysis is made, and plausible
therapeutic options are suggested (including encouraging the patient
to think in a certain way), that seems to me beyond reproach.  I think
that at least in the current state of the art, there is every reason
to view such computers as cognitive agents, without necessarily
attributing to them the full range of attributes of a mind.

I have written something on this in the form of a discussion on 
a particular kind of "separability hypothesis."  Those interested,
let me know, and I will send or post more.