New Millennium AI and the Convergence of History

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently become a real formal science: the new millennium brought the first mathematically sound, asymptotically optimal, universal problem solvers, providing a new, rigorous foundation for the previously largely heuristic field of General AI and embedded agents. At the same time there has been rapid progress in practical methods for learning true sequence-processing programs, as opposed to traditional methods limited to stationary pattern association. Here we will briefly review some of the new results, and speculate about future developments, pointing out that the time intervals between the most notable events in over 40,000 years or 29 lifetimes of human history have sped up exponentially, apparently converging to zero within the next few decades. Or is this impression just a by-product of the way humans allocate memory space to past events? © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.