This chapter from The Age of Intelligent Machines (published in 1990) addresses the history and development of AI, and where it was headed, circa 1990. Edward Feigenbaum is a Professor of Computer Science and Co-Scientific Director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. Dr. Feigenbaum served as Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force from 1994 to 1997. It has been said that when people make forecasts, they overestimate what can be done in the short run and underestimate what can be achieved in the long run. I have worked in the science and technology of artificial intelligence for twenty years and confess to being chronically optimistic about its progress. The gains have been substantial, even impressive. But we have hardly begun, and we must not lose sight of the point to which we are heading, however distant it may seem.

This is an updated version of Usability Issues in Description Logic Systems'' published in Proceedings of International Workshop on Description Logics, Gif sur Yvette, (Paris), France, September, 1997.

When we work harder, our hearts beat faster. When we're hot, we sweat. But in the 54 years since British mathematician Alan Turing introduced the notion of artificial intelligence, computer scientists haven't delivered anything close to a self-aware and self-healing computer. That may change soon enough. Researchers in business and government labs are building systems that will challenge what it means to be an IT worker by automating many of the monitoring and maintenance tasks done today by hand.

The American scientist Joshua Lederberg, who has died aged 82, won the 1958 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for showing that bacteria can conjugate and exchange small strips of genetic material. Among the consequences of this was the realisation that antibiotic resistance can be passed around between bacteria, rather than emerging from selective breeding of resistant strains. This opened new paths in genetic research. He went on to a distinguished career in science policy, advising government committees and presidents, heading Rockefeller University and writing a Washington Post column on science and society. Lederberg's father was an orthodox rabbi - the family had come to New York from Palestine - who wanted Joshua to follow in his footsteps.

Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid Android, the computer Deep Thought, space guitarist Hotblack Desiato (named after Adams's local estate agent) and the Guide itself, a remarkably prescient forerunner to the internet. Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough. Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe. Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship. One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale. Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology.

Major repairs can take a long time to complete. To tackle these problems, the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) has partnered with the Georgia Tech Research Institute to develop robotic technology that automatically detects and then seals cracks in the road. When prototype testing is completed the resulting'Roadbot' will be fully automated and require only a single operator reports Government Computer News. The technology could also save highway departments across the country money due to the pro-active approach of sealing smaller cracks before they become larger scale repaving projects. The prototype can be mounted on a trailer and then using LED lights, cameras and an advanced set of algoriths to locate cracks.

WHO would have thought that a Frisbee-shaped contraption that extracts dust from carpets would be the state of the art in household robots at the dawn of the 21st century? In the past year, Roomba, a circular automatic vacuum cleaner made by a firm called iRobot, has swept up millions of dollars from over 200,000 buyers--and was a must-have at Christmas, among geeks at least. Rival firms such as Electrolux and Karcher sell similar but pricier sweepers. Robot vacuum cleaners, it seems, are catching on. Are these mere playthings, or the beginning of a new trend?

IN 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer.

What if machines could think like us -- comprehending social cues, visual prompts and spoken words just like a human would? For Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Professor Patrick Winston, the Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science and leader of the Genesis Group at CSAIL, uncovering the true nature of human intelligence is the next grand challenge. To solve the puzzle of how humans think, Winston is employing classic engineering methodology to build systems that think and comprehend as people do using computational methods. Motivated by a desire to advance artificial intelligence and create systems that operate in a manner consistent with high-level human thinking, Winston feels there is a substantial difference between machines that actually display human-like intelligence and those that possess superb computational powers such as IBM's Watson system. For Winston, understanding what makes us different leads to questioning our uniquely symbolic nature, our ability to build descriptions using an inner language, and especially our ability to construct and tell stories, from fairy tales to case studies.

Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net. So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, has been researching this topic for more than four years. What he wants is to show how ideology is used to warp time.