A short history of AI
In the first of six weekly briefs, we ask how AI overcame decades of underdelivering
Over the summer of 1956 a small but illustrious group gathered at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; it included Claude Shannon, the begetter of information theory, and Herb Simon, the only person ever to win both the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Turing Award awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery. They had been called together by a young researcher, John McCarthy, who wanted to discuss “how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts” and “solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans”. It was the first academic gathering devoted to what McCarthy dubbed “artificial intelligence”. And it set a template for the field’s next 60-odd years in coming up with no advances on a par with its ambitions.
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This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “A short history of AI ”
Schools brief July 20th 2024
From the July 20th 2024 edition
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