Artificial Intelligence Meets Ancient Ritual in New Wedding Planning Software

This is really not what I'd call "artificial intelligence" and it doesn't involve any machine learning, but it certainly is somewhat amusing. (Warning: the article is a press release, so take mental precations!) This program uses what you might call an expert system to suggest the wording for your wedding invitations and to do things like expand abbreviations (you aren't supposed to use abbreviations on your formal invitations, according to the article). So, for example,

... the software figured out that a street address ending in “LA CT” means “Louisiana Court”, but a street address ending in “CT LA” means “Connecticut Lane”

This is all fun to read about, but is fundamentally a downer for me -- it just serves to remind me how far we have to go before we have truly functional intelligent systems that can reason about the activities we are doing and help us do them. Just thinking about the work left to do gives me the willies.

Imagine trying to shoehorn all of this kind of "intelligent" technologies into today's infrastructure of API's and libraries -- Windows could add an abbreviation expander API, but if all APIs of similar functionality were added you'd need an expert system just to help you put all the right APIs together... But wait, you already need an expert system in order to figure out the current APIs! (or to become an expert yourself, which amounts to the same thing, right?)

Link: http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/9/emw160666.htm