It may seem rash to expect fully intelligent machines in a few decades, when the computers have barely matched insect mentality in a half–century of development. Indeed, for that reason, many long–time artificial intelligence researchers scoff at the suggestion, and offer a few centuries as a more believable period. But there are very good reasons why things will go much faster in the next fifty years than they have in the last fifty... Since 1990, the power available to individual AI and robotics programs has doubled yearly, to 30 MIPS (machine instructions per second) by 1994 and 500 MIPS by 1998. Seeds long ago alleged barren are suddenly sprouting. Machines read text, recognize speech, even translate languages. Robots drive cross–country, crawl across Mars, and trundle down office corridors. In 1996 a theorem–proving program called EQP running five weeks on a 50 MIPS computer at Argonne National Laboratory found a proof of a Boolean algebra conjecture by Herbert Robbins that had eluded mathematicians for sixty years. And it is still only Spring. Wait until Summer.