A clarification of misconceptions, myths and desired status of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a long tradition. The name AI was coined by McCarthy at the Dartmouth conference in 1956 starting a concerted endeavor that continues to date [1]. The initial focus of AI was on symbolic models and reasoning as search followed by the first wave of neural networks and expert systems [2-4]. In the 1980s neural networks had a first return by invention of the back-propagation algorithm [5] and in the 1990s research about intelligent agents received broad interest. Recently, big data became available and led to revival of neural networks in the form of deep neural networks [6, 7]. AI has achieved great successes in many different fields including robotics, speech recognition, facial recognition, healthcare and finance [7-12]. Given the breath of AI applications and the variety of methods used it is no surprise that seemingly simple questions, e.g., regarding the aims and goals of AI got obscured especially for those scientists who did not accompany the field since