The Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Business

ion is a perplexing problem. Perhaps we cannot design such a machine. However, if we cannot, it will be difficult for existing machines to cope with people who are increasingly more complex. This is a catch-22 situation, with machines expected to be real experts while, at the same time, people or the problems become more and more complex than they were before such devices came into being in the first place.  Can Machines Think? Much of human behavior has nothing to do with time, and much of it deals solely with time. Time separates "now" from "then," and "now" from "when." It is generally accepted that there are day people, who work well during the daylight hours; and night people, who experience their best at night. Time is the structure that separates events into those occurring simultaneously and those taking place over an infinite spectrum of time. Much of brain activity takes place constantly, although activities also exist that have specific time requirements. This is the paradox of time. For example, sleep generally takes place at night when one is tired; therefore, night might be a factor in triggering sleep. Yet, in another sense, the brain is active all the time in order to keep us alive during sleep. Thus, the brain is always operating in real time and is constantly at work. Machines, however, are generally at rest, except when called upon by humans to work. There are many theories about this active sense of the brain at work, but little is known about how much work is actually being performed by the brain, with the possible exception of research into the understanding of dreams. It is this concept of dreams and their associated representational approach to the brain that is intriguing as a way to understand a larger view of behavior and thinking. Various types of activities, from physical motor activities to speech and language, are all available spontaneously to humans. Humans can stand, sit, yell, or perform an infinite variety of functions without thinking about them. Essentially, the software or program behind these activities has been well written and debugged. What is not provided genetically, we program in ourselves. In many areas, the program code is waiting to be written. Learning how to ski, write a sonnet, or fly an airplane is something that we program ourselves to do. These types of activities represent a step beyond the level of merely replacing an activity that is known with another that is unknown and communicated to us. Figure 2.2 shows some of the steps in a knowledge engineering system. Under consideration is the issue of real-time thinking. One might ask, What is the comparison? There is a new genre of research that suggests that nonreal-time activity opens a new dimension in offering humans contemplative time. In fact, real-time communication is quite interruptive and even disruptive. This represents 64  The use of color indicates existing product modules. Uncolored areas represent lulu re functionality (hat may be implemented either as discrete product modules or as capabilities within modules. This map is intended as an aid to discussion of IEW operational concepts, not as a depiction of actual product architecture.