Whither AI: Identity Challenges of 1993-95

The 1993-95 period presented various "identity challenges" to the field of AI and to AAAI as a leading scientific society for the field. The euphoric days of the mid-1980s AI boom were over, various expectations of those times had not been met, and there was continuing concern about an AI "winter." The major challenge of these years was to chart a path for AI, designed and endorsed by the broadest spectrum of AI researchers, that built on past progress, explained AI's capacity for addressing fundamentally important intellectual problems and realistically predicted its potential to contribute to technological challenges of the coming decade. This reflection piece considers these challenges and the ways in which AAAI helped the field to move forward. Adolescence, the twenties, and the forties each bring particular "developmental" challenges to people, and, though surely coincidentally, elements of those life stages seem also to characterize the period of my presidency.