"Scientific Progress in Artificial Intelligence: History, Status, and Futures" is a review chapter by Eric Horvitz (Microsoft, formerly President of AAAI) and Tom M. Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon University, AAAI past president), published in 2024 as a chapter in Jamieson, Mazza & Kearney (Eds.), Realizing the Promise and Minimizing the Perils of AI for Science and the Scientific Community (University of Pennsylvania Press). It surveys the history, current status, and future trajectories of AI as a scientific field.
Summary
The chapter reviews the history, current status, and future trajectories of AI as a scientific field. It anchors its account in AAAI's definition of the field as the pursuit of "the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines," and covers learning, reasoning, problem-solving, planning, language understanding, and visual perception.
As a single-document overview of AI as a scientific field, the chapter serves as an academic-review anchor for historical claims about AI development, capability trajectory, and research priorities.
Relation to companion sources
The chapter pairs with A Rosetta Stone for AI Benchmarks — Ho, Denain, Atanasov, Albanie, Shah (Epoch AI / Google DeepMind, 2025) on the measurement methodology side: Ho et al. provide a capability-stitching framework, while Horvitz & Mitchell supply the historical context. Trends in AI Supercomputers — Pilz, Sanders, Rahman, Heim (Epoch AI / Georgetown / GovAI, 2025) is a companion reference on the compute side. The history-and-status framing offers baseline calibration for the forecasting frameworks in Broad Timelines and AI 2027. Horvitz is a senior AI scientist anchored at Eric Horvitz (planned); Mitchell at Tom Mitchell (planned). The chapter is intended as a canonical anchor for History of AI (planned).
Relationships
- supports: History of AI (planned, canonical anchor), Broad Timelines, AI 2027
- related: A Rosetta Stone for AI Benchmarks — Ho, Denain, Atanasov, Albanie, Shah (Epoch AI / Google DeepMind, 2025) (companion methodology), Trends in AI Supercomputers — Pilz, Sanders, Rahman, Heim (Epoch AI / Georgetown / GovAI, 2025) (companion compute-side), Eric Horvitz (planned), Tom Mitchell (planned)
- instance-of: AI Progress Measurement