  Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently become a real formal science: the
new millennium brought the first mathematically sound, asymptotically optimal,
universal problem solvers, providing a new, rigorous foundation for the
previously largely heuristic field of General AI and embedded agents. At the
same time there has been rapid progress in practical methods for learning true
sequence-processing programs, as opposed to traditional methods limited to
stationary pattern association. Here we will briefly review some of the new
results, and speculate about future developments, pointing out that the time
intervals between the most notable events in over 40,000 years or 2^9 lifetimes
of human history have sped up exponentially, apparently converging to zero
within the next few decades. Or is this impression just a by-product of the way
humans allocate memory space to past events?
