In the land of IT, the one thing you can count on is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar.
In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.
[ InfoWorld reveals tech's 25 biggest flops of all time, plus the dirty vendor tricks to watch out for. | Snake oil, shenanigans, and snafus -- Robert X. Cringely's Notes from the Field blog is your guide to the fun and crazy world of tech. ]
Today, cloud computing, virtualization, and tablet PCs are vying for the hype crown. At this point it's impossible to tell which claims will bear fruit, and which will fall to the earth and rot.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, however, it's easy to see how we got sucked into believing claims that simply weren't true -- whether they were about the promise of artificial intelligence or the practicality of ERP.
Here then are six technologies -- five old, one new -- that have earned the dubious distinction of being the hype kings of their respective eras. Think about them the next time a sales team comes knocking on your door.
1. Artificial intelligence
Era: Late 1950s to present
The pitch: "Some day we will build a thinking machine. It will be a truly intelligent machine. One that can see and hear and speak. A machine that will be proud of us." -- Thinking Machines Corp., year unknown
Once upon a time, machines were going to do our thinking for us. And then, of course, they'd grow tired of doing humanity's bidding and exterminate us.
The good news? We haven't been offed by the machines (yet). The bad news is that artificial intelligence has yet to fully deliver on its promises. Like, for example, in 1964, when researchers at the newly created Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab assured the Pentagon that a truly intelligent machine was only about a decade away. Guess what? It's still at least 10 years away.
Several times in the decades since, companies have tried to build an industry around AI computers -- largely supported by government research dollars -- only to run headfirst into an "AI winter" when the funding dried up.
"The longest failing technology has been AI and expert systems," says John Newton, CTO of Alfresco, an open source enterprise content management vendor. Newton began his tech career intent on studying AI, but ended up working with databases instead. "For 40 years, AI has not delivered."
Or maybe it has, but in subtler ways than the so-called thinking machines first envisioned when Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1956. Technologies that seem mundane to us now would have looked a lot like artificial intelligence 30 or 40 years ago, notes Doug Mow, senior VP of marketing at Virtusa, an IT systems consultancy.
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Download now »As was pointed out in in the article, the merit or lack thereof in "Artificial Intelligence" lies in how you define it. Relative to the technology of the day in the mid 1980s a Huge amount of commonly accepted, frequently used, software of today IS the very feature sets and applications that were over hyped back then. For example, "Expert Systems". The over-hype talked about medical diagnosis, a pipe dream, but today there are maintenance assistance "wizards" using a basic expert system reasoning engine approach for an amazing array of complex products. Such as trade show kiosks that use a Lisp ES Engine to guide prospects through selection of products, or business process automation tools that capture BP "Rules" and enforce them in a framework that defines processes. And these are just from the "Expert System" branch of the tree.
From the key pattern recognition / pattern matching work of that era, comes a whole industry of web ad services, Google, AdAware, and much much more. Financial Services, as alluded to in the article, bank card and others do fraud detection with a sophistication undreamed in 1984. The FS world also commits serious capital to automated trading today with tools drawn from this same tool box. The whole "Business Intelligence" category of commercial software, not to mention Google, owes it's very existence to concepts that are AI in a very real sense. The list goes on.
Robotics and motion control is yet another area where the dreams of the 80s are on the manufacturing floor of this decade, as well as in many consumer products. Manufacturing robots function today within communications, control and process feedback loops that completely eclipse the most advanced available in the 80s. Yet another area in that world is "Fuzzy Logic". Bots and droids of all sorts today can come to a smooth and rapid halt after repositioning with a precision that makes even the most practiced human envious. In fact I daresay you would be hard pressed to find an autofocus camera on the market today that does not use this AI technique.
I am not even going to start on military applications. If I told you I'd just have to kill you, or some short-hair agent would come kill me. Suffice it to say in most cases you really do not want to know anyway.
So if AI is "bunk", I will take the approach the English have taken with their royalty for centuries. AI is dead. Long live AI!"
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