Strange article. The problem isn’t that everyone doesn’t know how everything works, it’s that AI coding could mean there is no one who knows how a system works.
I haven't been writing Rust for that long (about 2 years) but every time I see .unwrap() I read it as 'panic in production'. Clippy needs to have harder checks on unwrap.
To be fair the performance of rules or Bayesian networks or statistical models wasn't the problem (performance compared to existing practice). DeDombal showed in 1972 that a simple Bayes model was better than most ED physicians in triaging abdominal pain.
The main barrier to scaling was workflow integration due to lack of electronic data, and if it was available, interoperability (as it is today). The other barriers were problems with maintenance and performance monitoring, which are still issues today in healthcare and other industries.
I do agree the 5th Generation project never made sense, but as you point out they had developed hardware to accelerate Prolog and wanted to show it off and overused the tech. Hmmm, sounds familiar...