Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Systems

I became involved in AI during the 1970s, when I was in graduate school, because I wanted to understand the nature of the mind. This seemed as though it were one of the core questions of science, on an equal footing with questions about the nature of the universe and the nature of life. Artificial intelligence, with its computational metaphor, offered the only clear course for tackling this challenging problem, and the progress made in the field’s first 20 years, since its founding at the 1956 Dartmouth meeting, seemed impressive enough to promise rapid strides toward a broad computational theory of mental phenomena.