1996

The Voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI? On March 27, 2006, I gave a lighthearted and occasionally bittersweet presentation on "Whatever Happened to AI?" at the Stanford Spring Symposium presentation--to a lively audience of active AI researchers and formerly active ones (whose current inaction could be variously ascribed to their having aged, reformed, given up, redefined the problem, and so on). This article is a brief chronicling of that talk, and I entreat the reader to take it in that spirit: a textual snapshot of a discussion with friends and colleagues, rather than a scholarly article. I begin by whining about the Turing test, but only for a thankfully brief bit, and then get down to my top-10 list of factors that have retarded progress in our field, that have delayed the emergence of a true strong AI. When Marvin Minsky advised Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 40 years ago, it seemed that achieving a full HALlike AI by 2001 was every bit as likely as, well, ...