SRI International

Artificial Intelligence, as a maturing scientific/engineering discipline, is beginning to find its niche among the variety of subjects that are relevant to intelligent, perceptive behavior. A view of AI is presented that is based on a declarative representation of knowledge with seman-tic attachments to problem-specific procedures and data structures. Several important challenges to this view are briefly discussed It is argued that research in the field would be stimulated by a project to develop a computer individual that would have a continuing existence in time THOSE OF US engaged in artificial intelligence research have the historically unique privilege of asking and answering the most profound scientific and engineering questions that people have ever set for themselves-questions about the nature of those processes that separate us humans from the rest of the universe-namely intelligence, reason, perception, self-awareness, and language. It is clear-to most of us in AI, at least-that our field, perhaps together with molecular genetics, will be society’s predominant scientific endeavor for the rest of this cen-tury and well into the next-just as physics and chemistry predominated during the decades before and after 1900. The preoccupation of the physical sciences was, if you like, with This article is based on the author’s Presidential Address given at th