Introduction 

We call ourselves Homo sapiens—man the wise—because our intelligence is so important to us. For thousands of years, we have tried to understand how we think and act—that is, how our brain, a mere handful of matter, can perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world far larger and more complicated than itself. The field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is concerned with not just understanding but also building intelligent entities—machines that can compute how to act effectively and safely in a wide variety of novel situations.

Surveys regularly rank AI as one of the most interesting and fastest-growing fields, and it is already generating over a trillion dollars a year in revenue. AI expert Kai-Fu Lee predicts that its impact will be “more than anything in the history of mankind.” Moreover, the intellectual frontiers of AI are wide open. Whereas a student of an older science such as physics might feel that the best ideas have already been discovered by Galileo, Newton, Curie, Einstein, and the rest, AI still has many openings for full-time masterminds. AI currently encompasses a huge variety of subfields, ranging from the general (learning, reasoning, perception, and so on) to the specific, such as playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing poetry, driving a car, or diagnosing diseases. AI is relevant to any intellectual task; it is truly a universal field.

What Is AI?

We have claimed that AI is interesting, but we have not said what it is. Historically, researchers have pursued several different versions of AI. Some have defined intelligence in terms of fidelity to human performance, while others prefer an abstract, formal definition of intelligence called rationality—loosely speaking, doing the “right thing.” The subject matter itself also varies: some consider intelligence to be a property of internal thought processes and reasoning, while others focus on intelligent behavior, an external characterization.1 From these two dimensions—human vs. rational2 and thought vs. behavior—there are four possible combinations, and there have been adherents and research programs for all four. The methods used are necessarily different: the pursuit of human-like intelligence must be in part an empirical science related to psychology, involving observations and hypotheses about actual human behavior and thought processes; a rationalist approach, on the other hand, involves a combination of mathematics and engineering, and connects to statistics, control theory, and economics. The various groups have both disparaged and helped each other. Let us look at the four approaches in more detail.