The year MMVI marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Dartmouth Conference, where the term “Artificial Intelligence” was accepted as the official label of a new discipline that seemed to hold great promise in the pursuit of understanding the human mind. AI, as the nascent discipline came to be known in public and academic discourse, has accomplished a lot during this period, breaking new grounds and providing deep insights into our minds, our technologies, and the relationship between them. But AI also has failed tremendously, making false promises and often manifesting a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that is emblematic of Hollywood-style pecuniary projects. Like many others within and around AI, I am fascinated by those accomplishments and frustrated by these shortcomings. This book is a reflection on both. Currently, we witness a resurgence of interest in, and application of, AI in areas such as Artificial General Intelligence, Self-Aware Computing, video gaming, data mining, the Semantic Web, human-robot interaction, and so on. The revival makes a critical reassessment of the field a necessary task, which the current work has undertaken to achieve.

For me, this book is the outcome of a journey to pursue a lifelong interest in mind, cognition, and agency. I embarked on the study of Artificial Intelligence in order to understand not only the underlying technology but especially its implications for the way we understand ourselves.