From Where AI Is Now to Human-Level AI
John McCarthy
Computer Sciences Department
Stanford University
Abstract
It is not surprising that reaching human-level AI has proved to be
difficult and progress has been slow - though there has been definite
progress. The slowness and the demand to exploit what has been
discovered has led many to mistakenly redefine AI, sometimes in ways
that preclude human-level AI - by relegating to humans parts of the
task that human level computer programs should do. Taking such
redefinitions seriously impedes progress, especially by students.
This lecture tries to characterize the tasks that lie between us and
human-level AI, independent of the AI methodology chosen. These
problems include representation and reasoning.
Ideas for overcoming these problems, including nonmonotonic reasoning,
approximate concepts, formalized contexts and introspection, will be
discussed in the framework of logical AI.
Eyal Amir
Last modified: Mon Apr 20 11:58:45 PDT 1998