For hundreds of years, we (people) have fantasized about computers that could simulate ourselves. Now we have technology that comes close, in many ways, to doing that. The two main questions we will try to answer are:

• Where do we stand today in our quest to build an artifical human?
• What do the most informed predictions for the future tell us?

• Why is building an artifical human hard?"

• Why would anyone want an artificial person?
• How will our world be different if (when) we succeed in building one?

To begin to get a feeling for where AI is today, check out the following. The ones marked with (*) have demos that you can run.

• Computing in General: The Substrate for AI
  • Moore's Law
• AI - the big picture
  • The View from AAAI (the main professional organization for AI people). This site provides a great introduction to AI for a general audience.
  • The View from MIT
  • The View from CMU. Check out the CS department, the Robotics Institute, and the Language Technologies Institute.
  • (*) The Captcha project at CMU is attempting to find simple tests that are easy for people to pass but impossible for current computers.
• Speech and Language
  • For a long list in this area, including many demo systems, see the list I've prepared for my Natural Langage Processing class.
• Games
  • Links to many games sites, including software
  • Go
  • Chess
  • (*) Chinook, a champion checkers player
• The Arts
  • Aaron: An Electronic Artist
• Common Sense
  • (*) Open Mind is an MIT project designed to give computers common sense.
• Robotics
  • A Survey of Robotics from AAAI
  • Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. A more controversion view of the big picture.
  • Rea: The Humanoid Robot
  • (*) Urbie: The Urban Robot
  • Kismet: The Social Robot

A Powerpoint presentation on the history of AI.

A Powerpoint presentation with short intro to AI for a general audience.