Practical AI: Where it's been, and where it is now

AI has received much publicity since that it is difficult to assess all of them, rent AI technology lacks integrated comthe early 1980s but it has also been critiespecially since the people who make prehension, commonsense knowledge, or cized for its lack of real practicality in their living from expert systems often exdelicate pattern recognition. Even simple everyday commercial or industrial use. aggerate their usefulness. But generally, tasks (for a person) often require extenTruly practical applications were slow in most of the systems produced in this era sive background knowledge, which curcoming during most of the 1980s but the were not really practical; most ended up rent technology cannot implement. (This situation has been changing rapidly over problem is shared by other areas of AI: the past few years. Language translation, speech recognition, machine vision, and classical AI