Max Hauser wrote:

> Someone is reportedly selling software now to give personal wine
> recommendations (based on a questionnaire). It's hard for me to imagine a
> piece of software giving reliable personal wine recommendations, since that
> requires getting to know your tastes -- but this has been available (for
> centuries) from good local wine merchants if you have them.
>
> However, it's easy to imagine people selling software that promises to do
> so. Many of you can remember (before about the 1980s) when computers were
> much rarer, more expensive, and still had a larger-than-life mystique. This
> mystique was early exploited to make mechanistic advice look authoritative:
> The Computer Said It, and The Computer is awesome.

Max,
As you no doubt know, AI research has changed markedly since its
heyday in the '80s and has lately (in part) focused on expert systems.
I have no doubt that someone with decent resources could create a wine
expert system that, given enough data input, could perform about as well
as most wine merchants. However, I doubt that that is what you're
talking about here. Regarding your second point, you also no doubt
remember two of the earliest forays into AI: Eliza and Parry, the former
mimicking a therapist and the latter a paranoid schizophrenic. Both
were of course nothing more than hardcoded chatbots in today's parlance,
but still managed to fool quite a few gullible souls into thinking that
they were talking to real people.

Thanks for the bibliography,
Mark Lipton