When AI research started in the 1950s, all the pioneers took human-level AI as the goal. A few thought it would be achieved soon, but most were non-committal. As ought to have been expected, understanding intelligence well enough to program computers to have human-level AI has proved difficult. This still needs to be the goal even though some developers have proposed to redefine AI in more limited ways. Research in AI needs to be measured in terms of how it contributes to human-level AI.
 
This lecture will emphasize the logical approach to AI, i.e. representing information about the world by logical sentences and using programmed logical reasoning to decide what to do. Along this path there are many problems to be solved. Some of them are the frame problem (pretty well solved), properly formalizing nonmonotonic reasoning, the qualification problem and the ramification problem, and the problem of getting elaboration tolerant formalisms.
 
These problems arise in any approach to AI but haven't yet been noticed by some of the recent advocates of probabilistic formalisms.

Professor John MacCarthy, Stanford University, known as the "father of artificial intelligence." He originated the LISP programming language for computing with symbolic expressions, was one of the first to propose and design time-sharing computer systems, and pioneered in using mathematical logic to prove the correctness of computer programs. He has also written papers on the social implications of computer and other technology.

He received the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1971 for his contributions to computer science. He received the first Research Excellence Award of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1985. He received the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in 1990. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences.