113 Essays on Infinite Lifespans   William Sims Bainbridge examining the current state of AI. In the past, proponents of AI oversold the capabilities of their technology, leading to a general stigmatization of the entire field within computer sci- ence. [22] Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of AI, coupled with a refocus. People  who  availed  themselves  of  the  opportunity  to  visit the website of the National Science Foundation (NSF), could have seen an expansion of grant programs in this area over the past year or two. A new program in Computer Vision emerged from  the  program  in  Robotics  and  Human  Augmentation. A  new  program  in  Human  Language  and  Communication (really multi-modal computerized language processing) simi- larly emerged from the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) program. And the Knowledge and Cognitive Systems (KCS) program  morphed  into  a  program  explicitly  called  Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. As it happens, I ran both the HCI and KCS programs for two years and work closely with all of these programs. However, what I write here is not based on any insider knowledge, but simply on what has been available for any visitor to the NSF website to see. Anybody who wants to know exactly what research all of these programs are funding can search the web-based NSF awards database, which offers abstracts of all grants made during the past 15 years. Some of the more vocal pioneers of AI claimed that their work was giving machines the power to think the way humans do, but the failure of their technology to match human perfor- mance has become a profound embarrassment, now that they can no longer blame the slow speeds and low memory capacity of their computers. Recently, the focus of AI has shifted from supplanting to supplementing human intelligence. The goal is no longer a walking, talking robot, but tools that improve the effectiveness of information systems serving human needs. When the Spirit robot rover was falling toward the Martian surface, immediately before its heroic bounces to a safe land-