Symbolic AI, also known as GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence), is a methodology that uses high-level, human-readable symbols to represent problems and logic to solve them. This approach mimics human reasoning through rule-based systems and was dominant in AI research from the 1950s to the 1980s. Unlike modern machine learning techniques, symbolic AI requires explicit programming of rules and logic, making it less flexible but more interpretable.