> Partly due to the recognized difficulty of the problem, in the 1970s-1980s mainstream AI gradually moved away from general-purpose intelligent systems, and turned to domain-specific problems and special-purpose solutions...<p>I think there's little evidence for this. What happened in the 1980s was the introduction of and overselling of expert systems. These systems applied AI techniques to specific problems: but those techniques themselves were still pretty foundational. This is like saying that because electricity was used for custom things, we started inventing custom electricity.<p>> Consequently, the field currently called "AI" consists of many loosely related subfields without a common foundation or framework, and suffers from an identity crisis:<p>Nonsense. AI of course consists of loosely related subfields with no common foundation. But even back in the 1960s, when a fair chunk of (Soft) AI had something approaching a foundation (search), the identity of the field was not defined by this but rather by a common goal: to create algorithms which, generally speaking, can perform tasks that we as humans believe we alone are capable of doing because we possess Big Brains. This identity-by-common-goal hasn't changed.<p>So this web page has a fair bit of apologetics and mild shade applied to soft AI. What it doesn't do is provide any real criticism of the AGI field. And there's a lot to offer. AGI has a reasonable number of serious researchers. But it is also replete with snake oil, armchair philosophers, and fanboy hobbyists. Indeed the very name (AGI) is a <i>rebranding</i>. The original, long accepted term was <i>Hard AI</i>, but it accumulated so much contempt that the word itself was changed by its practitioners. This isn't uncommon for ultrasoft areas of AI: ALife has long had this issue (minus the snake oil). But at least they're honest about it.