Revisiting the Dream

For much of its history, the field of AI has been in retreat from the most ambitious goals of its founders. Rather than attempting to understand and replicate general intelligence, research concentrated on smaller, better-defined perceptual and reasoning tasks over limited domains. We are now at a point, however, where the subfields are coming together again, and the idea of achieving the old dream of AI is no longer fanciful. We are entering an age of computerized personal servants, self-driving vehicles, the universal natural language translator, and the solution to the mysteries of the brain. The merging of human and machine intelligence will drive progress on problems across science, industry, and education. Kautz will recap some of the transformative events we have witnessed over the past few years, and describe a vision of the near future that is both realistic and more wildly optimistic than most serious scientists would have dared imagine a decade ago.