Last night I saw a pre-screening of the movie Stealth, the latest Science Fiction flick in which an artificially intelligent machine (in this case an Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle) stars in a major role. The movie has a couple of scenes that pay homage to the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which HAL, the advanced AI computer, is a key character. What amazed me in the new movie was a realization of just how far AI has come. When I saw 2001, the idea of the talking computer that understood language was so cool that I decided then and there that I wanted to be an AI scientist someday. In Stealth, the AI carries on normal conversation with humans, flies a high powered airplane, and shows many human-level capabilities without it really raising an eyebrow—the plot revolves around its actions (and emotions), not around how “cool” it is that a computer can do these things.
From the point of view of the AI vision, we’ve already achieved many of the things the field’s founders used for motivators: for example, a computer beat the world’s chess champ, commercial systems are exploiting continually improving voice and speech capabilities, there are robots running around the surface of Mars, and the Word Processor I’m using to write this comment helps to correct my grammar mistakes. We’ve grown from a field with one conference to one in which many subareas hold well-attended conferences on a regular basis, and where it is rare to see a university that does not include AI in its undergraduate curriculum. We in the field are sometimes too fast to recognize our own faults and too slow to realize just how amazingly far we’ve come in such a short time.