Kai-Uwe Kuhnberger, IKW, University of Osnabruck, Germany. Pascal Hitzler, AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.

We argue that Neural-Symbolic Integration is a topic of central importance for the advancement of Artificial General Intelligence.

Artificial General Intelligence – the quest for artifi- cially created entities with human-like abilities – has been pursued by humanity since the invention of ma- chines. It has also been a driving force in establishing artificial intelligence (AI) as a discipline. 20th century AI, however, has developed into a much narrower di- rection, focussing more and more on special-purpose and single-method driven solutions for problems which were once (or still are) considered to be challenging, like game playing, speech recognition, natural language understanding, computer vision, cognitive robotics, and many others. 20th century AI can, in our opinion, be perceived as expert system AI, producing and pursuing solutions for specific tasks. We don’t say that this is a bad development – quite in contrast, we think that this was (and still is) a very worthwhile adventure with ample (and in some cases well-proven) scope for considerable impact on our society.