The first edition of this book was about artificial intelligence (AI). This second edition is about education. It is hard to see how this could be. Are these two subjects really in any way the same? My answer is that fundamentally they are, but of course, I recognize that such a notion would not necessarily be accepted as gospel truth. The common element is learning. Without learning there are neither intelligent machines nor intelligent people.

The subtitle of the original Dynamic Memory was “a theory of reminding and learning in computers and people”. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was fascinated by the idea that computers could be as intelligent as people. My assumption was that if we could figure out what intelligence was like in people, then we could get computers to model people. Detail the process sufficiently and - presto! - intelligent machines. I no longer hold such views.

Since 1981, not as much has happened in AI as one might have hoped. The goal of building a dynamic memory, a memory that changed over time as a result of its experiences, has proven to be quite difficult to achieve. The major reason for this is really one of content rather than structure. It is not so much that we can't figure out how such a memory might be organized, although this is indeed a difficult problem. Rather, we simply were not able to even begin to acquire the content of a dynamic memory.