TITLE : FIFTH GENERATION: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND JAPAN'S COMPUTER CHALLENGE TO THE WORLD, THE.*

Time magazine's "Man of the Year" for 1982 was not a man at all, but a machine-the computer. The computer revolution has barely begun, but already we see a startling penetration of computers in most forms of work people do, their gadgets and machinery, and their entertainment. The economists tell us that we have become a nation of knowledge workers: more than half of us are engaged in the various forms of knowledge and information processing. The computer is the knowledge worker's tool, as the planting and harvesting machines are to the farmer and the heavy industrial machines are to the manufacturing worker. The ascendancy of the knowledge worker is reflected in the ascendancy of the tool-the computer. It has been a long time since a child of technology has had such a profound effect upon our lives and our society.

Knowledge is power, and the computer is an amplifier of that power. We are now at the dawn of a new computer revolution. Business Week featured it as "the second computer age." We view it as the important computer revolution, the transition from information processing to knowledge processing, from computers that calculate and store data to computers that reason and inform. Artificial intelligence is emerging from the laboratory and is beginning to take its place in human affairs. Professor Allen Newell of Carnegie-Mellon University, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, once wrote that "computer technology offers the possibility of incorporating intelligent behavior in all the nooks and crannies of our world." The nooks and crannies are right now being filled with computers, and the intelligent behavior is following quickly along.

The American computer industry has been innovative, vital, and successful. It is, in a way, the ideal industry. It creates value by transforming the brainpower of the knowledge workers, with little consumption of energy and raw materials. Today we dominate the world's ideas and markets in this most important of all modern technologies. But what about tomorrow?

The Japanese have seen gold on distant hills and have begun to move out. Japanese planners view the computer industry as vital to their nation's economic future and have audaciously made it a national goal to become number one in this industry by the latter half of the 1990s. They aim not only to dominate the traditional forms of the computer industry but to establish a "knowledge industry" in which knowledge itself will be a salable commodity like food and oil. Knowledge itself is to become the new wealth of nations.

To implement this vision the Japanese have both strategy and tactics. Their strategy is simple and wise: to avoid a head-on confrontation in the marketplace with the currently dominant American firms; instead to look out into the 1990s to find an arena of great economic potential that is currently being overlooked by the more shortsighted and perhaps complacent American firms; to move rapidly now to build major strength in that arena. The tactics are set forth in a major and impressive national plan of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) called Fifth Generation Computer Systems. The plan documents a carefully staged ten-year research and development program on Knowledge Information Processing Systems. The implementation began in April 1982 with the formation of the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) and coordinated laboratories of the major Japanese firms in the computer industry.

The Japanese plan is bold and dramatically forward-looking. It is unlikely to be completely successful in the ten-year period. But to view it therefore as "a lot of smoke," as some American industry leaders have done, is a serious mistake. Even partially realized concepts that are superbly engineered can have great economic value, preempt the market, and give the Japanese the dominant position they seek.

We now regret our complacency in other technologies. Who in the 1960s took seriously the Japanese initiative in small cars? Who in 1970 took seriously the Japanese national goal to become number one in consumer electronics in ten years? (Have you seen an American VCR that isn't Japanese on the inside?) In 1972, when the Japanese had yet to produce their first commercial microelectronic chip but announced their national plans in this vital "made in America" technology, who would have thought that in ten years they would have half of the world's market for the most advanced memory chips? Are we about to blow it again? The consequences of complacency, of our spirited attention to the near in at the expense of the long view, will be devastating to the economic health of our most important industry. The Japanese could thereby become the dominant industrial power in the world.

We are writing this book because we are worried. But we are also basically optimistic. Americans invented this technology! If only we could focus our efforts, we should have little trouble dominating the second computer age as we dominated the first. We have a two- or three-year lead; that's large in the world of high technology. But we are squandering our lead at the rate of one day per day.

America needs a national plan of action, a kind of space shuttle program for the knowledge systems of the future. In this book we have tried to explain this new knowledge technology, its roots in American and British research, and the Japanese Fifth Generation plan for extending and commercializing it. We have also outlined America's weak, almost non-existent response to this remarkable Japanese challenge. The stakes are high. In the trade wars, this may be the crucial challenge. Will we rise to it? If not, we may consign our nation to the role of the first great postindustrial agrarian society.