ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

AI Expert Systems Meet the Crisis of Expertise: NASA, Newt Gingrich, and Challenges to Rules Based Programming in U.S. Technology Policy in the 1990s

• In Event: Actors, Agents, and Experts in Computing and AI: Decision-making and Contested Authority in Automated Realms

English Abstract

This paper explores a forgotten narrative in the emerging “AI Winter” of federal government computing in the United States in the mid-1990s. A flourishing community of expert system approaches to artificial intelligence emerged in the 1980s out of NASA’s space science researchers, relying on object-oriented computer programming, and distinct from trends in commercial expert systems circles in American and Japanese corporations during that decade. By the mid-1990s, this approach fell under unlikely assault from larger cultural and political challenges to notions of expertise in the United States. Attacks on technological assessment associated with New Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the U.S. Congress in 1994 and 1995 paralleled rising social and cultural pushback to “expert-driven” framings of knowledge management in American institutional culture. Drawing on period news coverage, trade publications, and archival correspondence, this paper draws an unlikely link between a closed word of computer science in which one definition of “expert” barreled headlong into a broader political, scientific, and cultural debate over the more general boundaries and authority of “expertise.”

Author

• Andrew Meade McGee, Smithsonian Institution