Artificial Intelligence in the Pacific Rim

Book excerpt: In the last decade, AI firmly settled into our industrial society with the expert systems as the representative product. However, almost every one of the systems could cover only a single task domain. In the highly mechanized world of the 21st century, systems will become smart and user friendly enough to cover a wide range of task domains. Systems with much user friendliness must be multilingual because users in different domains usually have different languages. Language is formed in its own culture. Therefore, promotion for cross-cultural scientific interchange will be indispensable for the progress of AI.