Hitting the Books: The Brooksian revolution that led to rational robots

We are living through an AI renaissance thought wholly unimaginable just a few decades ago -- automobiles are becoming increasingly autonomous, machine learning systems can craft prose nearly as well as human poets, and almost every smartphone on the market now comes equipped with an AI assistant. Oxford professor Michael Woolridge has spent the past quarter decade studying technology. In his new book, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, Woolridge leads readers on an exciting tour of the history of AI, its present capabilities, and where the field is heading into the future. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued that, as scientific understanding advances, there will be times when established scientific orthodoxy can no longer hold up under the strain of manifest failures.