50 YEARS AND COUNTING
John McCarthy, Stanford University
jmc@cs.stanford.edu
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/

To an audience question asking how optimistic I was at the time of the Dartmouth Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, I can often answer that I hoped for human-level AI before you were born.

Ones estimate of the time to complete a task depends on the obstacles one recognizes. There are many obstacles to human-level AI. Some have been overcome, some have been recognized but remain, and others haven't yet been identified.

I'll discuss all three but emphasize unsolved problems.

THE AI SITUATION IN 1956

Allen Newell and Herbert Simon