(These are excerpts from my book "Intelligence is not Artificial")
Steps toward the A.I. Winter
Unfortunately, the discipline of Artificial Intelligence soon became
a tragicomedy of exaggerations and misunderstandings, i.e. of natural stupidity.
1958: A New York Times article (8 July 1958) reports a press conference in wich Rosenblatt states "The Perceptron is the embryo of an electronic computer that (the US Navy) expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence"
1958: Bar-Hillel publishes a "proof" that machine translation is impossible
1965: Herbert Simon predicts that "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do"
1966: The ALPAC Report causes reduction in funding for machine translation research
1969: Minsky and Papert's "Perceptrons" kills research in neural networks in the USA
1970: Marvin Minsky to Life Magazine: "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being"
1972: Richard Karp shows there are many problems that can probably only be solved in exponential time
1973: The Lighthill Report kills A.I. in Britain
1980s: Wildly exaggerated Fifth Generation scare.
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, launched in 1982, to create a supercomputer particularly suited to symbolic A.I., and A.I. scientists spoke of an impending
apocalypse for the USA if it didn't embrace the concept and counterbalance it
the way it did with the Sputnik.
As Saint Bonaventure said in the 13th century: "The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind".
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