EXAMPLE III: ALDO CIMINO

Consider the oft-cited case from the early 80s of Aldo Cimino, the resident expert of Campbell Soup’s cooker system.

Occasionally, serious problems arise that require the services of an expert who understands the gritty details of the design, installation, and operation of the hydrostatic sterilizer. If this sterilizer is not working, bacteria will eat through the cans and plant operations would be seriously disrupted. If the problem cannot be solved in a few minutes, it may be necessary to throw away many thousands of cans of food.

Unfortunately, there are few human experts that understand the cooker systems well enough to handle any problem that may arise. Campbell Soup relied primarily one individual, Aldo Cimino(who had 45 years of experience), to deal with the toughest problems. Sometimes, a hydrostatic sterilizer had to be shut down until Mr. Cimino could be flown to a particular plant to work on this problem. |link|

Cimino is clearly an expert, and because of this epistemically privileged position he served an extremely valuable role within the business’ practices. But experts are like the Sith: there is always a master and an apprentice. Unfortunately, is was almost impossible to train anyone to Cimino’s level of expertise. Enter the machine:

Although programming an expert system to replicate the work of Aldo Cimino seemed near impossible due to the amount of knowledge and intuition he has gained through 45 years of experience, the power of artificial forever changed the way things were done at Campbell… The diagnostic system, with 150 heuristical rules built in, was completed in several months, and then tested in select factories for seven months until it was finally implemented in all of Campbell’s canneries a year later. It took roughly two years to develop and implement this expert system that could be mass produced, compared with the decades of experience that a single man needs to do the same task. Now, plant operators and personnel can quickly diagnose a problem with the cooker using this diagnostic expert system, thus eliminating costly cooker downtime.

Aldo, the name of Campbell’s new expert system, performs most of the same tasks that Cimino himself performed, with increases in speed, reliability and efficiency. But lets be fair and assume that tasks performed by Aldo and Mr. Cimino are roughly the same.

If the two experts perform the same functional role in their social context, are they playing the same social role? If not, what is lacking in Aldo’s case? Note that ‘functional role’ here includes things like trustworthiness, deference, reliability, and so on.