Toward human level machine intelligence - is it achievable?

Achievement of human level machine intelligence has long been one of the basic objectives of AI. Officially, AI was born in 1956. Since then, very impressive progress has been made in many areas - but not in the realm of human level machine intelligence. Anyone who has been forced to use a dumb automated customer service system will readily agree. The Turing test lies far beyond. Today, no machine can pass the Turing test and none is likely to do so in the foreseeable future.To make progress toward achievement of human level machine intelligence, AI must add to its armamentarium concepts and techniques drawn from other methodologies, especially evolutionary computing, neurocomputing and fuzzy logic. A key contribution of fuzzy logic is the machinery of Computing with Words (CW) and, more generally, NL-Computation. This machinery opens the door to mechanization of natural language understanding and computation with information described in natural language. Addition of this machinery to the armamentarium of AI would be an important step toward the achievement of human level machine intelligence and its applications in decision making, pattern recognition, analysis of evidence, diagnosis and assessment of causality. Such applications have a position of centrality in our info-centric society.