For the longest time futurists assured us that intelligent machines would be commonplace by the year 2001. A vast number of research projects in A.I. are started and finished each year, many of them looking for the golden screw — or algorithm — that makes the dream come true. However, research in psychology and brain science indicates that the key to intelligence is unlikely to hinge on a single principle or two. To be sure, work in cognitive science and A.I. to date has certainly increased our understanding of various aspects of mind. But the results are for the most part an unrelated collection of tidbits — not the full, holistic picture that would explain the workings of a normal brain, animal or human. Researchers continue to divide-and-conquer, instead of integrating, and as a result the work has benefited far fewer real-world applications than we would have wanted or expected, and failed to explain to a satisfactory level how the a mind emerges from the workings of a brain.

The future of A.I. lies not in a golden algorithm, or two, but in various golden combinations of highly diverse techniques and technologies.