Credit: Bob London

The goal of artificial intelligence (at least according to the field's founders) is to create computers whose intelligence equals or surpasses humans'. Achieving this goal is the famous "AI problem." To some, AI is the manifest destiny of computer science. To others, it's a failure: clearly, the AI problem is nowhere near being solved. Why? For the most part, the answer is simple: no one is really trying to solve it. This may come as a surprise to people outside the field. What have all those AI researchers been doing all these years? The reality is that they have largely given up on the grand ambitions of AI and are instead working on increasingly specialized subproblems: not just machine learning or natural-language understanding, say, but issues within those areas, like classifying objects or parsing sentences.

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