The full use of speech acts requires intelligence on the human level. Artificial intelligence has made progress, and there is a useful expert systems technology based on this progress, but human-level intelligence is still an unknown distance ahead of us. Therefore, it is important to analyze the proposed uses of speech acts and decide how much intelligence is required for each use. It is a contention of this paper that many uses of speech acts do not require many of the intellectual capabilities of humans. We further hope that Elephant 2000 will permit using whatever level of AI is feasible for the designers of any particular system. Care will be needed to ensure that a program doesn't require too much intelligence of the programs with which it interacts.
(more to come)