Excerpt

In 1956, a group of prominent mathematicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, computer programmers, and electrical engineers spent the summer at Dartmouth College defining the new field of “artificial intelligence.” In the proposal for this meeting, the organizers set forth their ambitious goals: “An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves” (McCarthy et al. 2006). The organizers were optimistic about the prospects: “We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.” In the end, the Dartmouth meeting did not succeed in producing such dramatic advances (Moor 2006), but it did serve the purpose of distinguishing this new field from several related efforts and of defining AI’s primary focus areas, thus setting the stage for decades of AI research that followed.

Marvin Minsky was one of the four main organizers of the Dartmouth meeting. His 1960 paper “Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence” is a status report for the field, four years in. The paper gives us a fascinating glimpse of how early AI researchers thought about the scope and goals of this nascent discipline. More interestingly, Minsky’s paper foreshadows the many debates about the nature of intelligence—natural or artificial—that persist today.

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