The Fifth Generation Fallacy: Why Japan is Betting Its Future on Artificial Intelligence

For several years much attention has been focused on Japan's highly publicized Fifth Generation Project, a research programme aimed at the development of 'intelligent' computers that can think like human beings. It has been claimed that such machines are the technology of the future, and whoever gets them first will emerge as the new leader of the world economy. In this book J. Marshall Unger shows that the West has completely misunderstood Japan's interest in artificial intelligence, and that Japanese researchers are less concerned with economic superiority than with solving a fundamental problem involving the notoriously difficult Japanese language and the challenges it poses for computer technology. Computer scientists; students of Japanese.