This chapter describes the background and purpose of the OECD’s Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Skills project, which is developing an approach to assessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics and their impact on education and work. This report represents the project’s first step to identify the capabilities to assess and the tests to use for the assessment. The chapter provides an overview of the approaches applied to date to predict the impact of technology on the future of work. It sets out a new approach and presents the project’s stages of developing a sound methodology for a systematic assessment of AI capabilities in the future. The chapter ends by presenting the structure of this report.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made considerable progress over the past 40 years, leading to both important applications now in daily use but also a lot of hype in the popular press. This chapter outlines a framework for understanding progress in AI to help understand how to better measure that progress. It describes three revolutions currently under way: deep learning, knowledge graphs and reasoning. It summarises the progress and limitations in each and contrasts them with human capabilities for learning, knowledge and reasoning. The chapter also summarises a fourth revolution to come, integrated intelligence, where the goal is to create systems with agency. It discusses some additional implications for measuring AI progress with respect to learning, knowledge, reasoning and agency.