A short history of Artificial Intelligence
The term artificial intelligence was used the first time in 1955 by John McCarthy, a math professor at Dartmouth who organized the seminal conference on the topic the following year. In 1957 the economist Herbert Simon predicted that computers would beat humans at chess within 10 years (he was slightly wrong, it took 40). In 1967 the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky said, “Within a generation, the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will be substantially solved.” Simon and Minsky were both intellectual giants, but they were wrong about AI badly. These dramatic but wrong claims caused various repercussions in how people in the second half of 20th century thought about AI: more as a subject of a science fiction novel than actual science.
The idea of an Artificial Intelligence, automation of certain repetitive processes, dates back to the Cold War when US intelligence was trying to translate Russian documents...
