Toward Human-Level Machine Intelligence

Can machines think? This question has been an object of discussion and debate for over half-a-century. My interest in the question goes back to the beginning of my academic career. Officially, AI was born in l956. At its birth there was widespread expectation that within a few years it will be possible to build machines that could think like humans. I did not share that belief. To the pioneers, symbolic logic was all that was needed. Anything that involved numerical computations was unwelcome. It took close to thirty years for probability theory to gain grudging acceptance. Clearly, adding probability theory to the armamentarium of AI is a step in the right direction. But is it sufficient? In my view, the answer is: No.