But, he says, where AI is about getting computers to solve problems that would be solved in the frontal lobe of the brain, autonomic computing has more in common with the autonomic nervous system.
A paper in Philosophical Transactions by Karin Meissner of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich concludes that placebo treatments are also able to affect the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious functions such as heartbeat, blood pressure, digestion and the like.
In computer terms, this means that an autonomic system has to know its own resources, and be able to reconfigure itself, to call up redundant elements in case of a malfunction and to destroy computer viruses automatically.This is a tall order that will take decades to fill, as Dr Horn is the first to admit.
To start the ball rolling, Dr Patterson recently developed a simple way to estimate the cost of downtime by computing the time wasted by employees who cannot get their work done because of computer problems.There is another economic reason why autonomic computing might not be adopted as quickly as advocates would like.
This raises the question of how autonomic do users want their computers to become?
It is, however, a plausible hypothesis, and there is some evidence that their autonomic nervous systems (which control basic bodily functions such as heartbeat and body temperature) have not been working properly.As so often, these findings raise as many questions as they answer.
IBM trumpets the dawn of "on-demand IT fon-demand IT through IBM's "autonomic computing" architecture.
Mr Coburn at UBS says the talk of autonomic computing reminds him "of a high-school science fair", and thinks it may be just another one of those things that IT vendors "throw on the wall to see what sticks".Buried deep underneath the guff, however, there is indeed a technology widely considered to have the potential for radical simplification.
And while IBM continues to conduct research into artificial intelligence, Dr Morris does not link autonomic computing to such work.
IBM hopes that its eLiza project, part of Big Blue's autonomic computing initiative (see this article in the Technology Quarterly) will make its huge IT-services arm more efficient.
Dr Newton believes the build-up could be influenced entirely, or at least in part, by the degree to which the autonomic nervous system fails to properly maintain blood flow.
