About this item
The somewhat ill-defined long-term aim of AI is to build machines that are conscious, self-aware, and sentient; machines capable of the kind of intelligent autonomous action that currently only people are capable of. As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous. Driverless cars and automated translation tools are just two examples of AI technologies that have become a practical, everyday reality in the past few years, and which will have a huge impact on our world.
About the Author
I am a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow at Hertford College. I joined Oxford on 1 June 2012; before this I was for twelve years a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. My main research interests are in the use of formal techniques of one kind or another for reasoning about multiagent systems. I am particularly interested in the computational aspects of rational action in systems composed of multiple self-interested computational systems. My current research is at the intersection of logic, computational complexity, and game theory.
