>Do you think AI progress is going to continue accelerating for a while? From where I stand, it looks like the more recent progress in AI is due to a shift in

>Do you think AI progress is going to continue accelerating for a while? From where I stand, it looks like the more recent progress in AI is due to a shift in research hypotheses. It used to be like "AI is the attempted simulation, or sometimes attempted emulation, of human cognition"; now it's more like "AI is a medium for various forms of human expression". Ms. Koller's work emphasizes numerical expression; the work in Game AI emphasizes visual-artistic and/or logical expression, the work in Natural Language Processing emphasizes expression in natural language. Few people try for machines which pass the Turing Test; many try for machines which capture a small slice of real-life semantics and run with it. As Alan Perlis once wrote: "When we write programs that 'learn', it turns out we do and they don't." I believe that we increasingly realize what he meant with this. And that's good, because not only does it say something about what we cannot do, but it also says what we can. People are increasingly aware of this, go pragmatic (Google/MapReduce proved that you can go quite a ways using brute force), and make progress.