Artificial intelligence: where has it been, and where is it going?

The directions for near-future development of artificial intelligence (AI) can be described in terms of four dichotomies: the use of reasoning versus the use of knowledge; the roles of parallel and of serial systems; systems that perform and systems that learn to perform; and programming languages derived from the search metaphor versus languages derived from the logical reasoning metaphor. Although the author believes that there are reasons for emphasizing knowledge systems (production systems) that are serial, capable of expert performance, and designed in terms of the search metaphor, the other pathways are also important and should not be ignored. In particular, empirical work is needed in the construction and empirical testing of the performance of large systems to explore all of these branching pathways