AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods

Sometimes it’s worth taking the Big Picture view. While the phrase “Artificial Intelligence” and the modern AI era began with Turing’s paper on intelligent machinery and with John McCarthy’s 1955 “A proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence”. The proposal was co-authored with Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ is first introduced in that proposal; many of those who would become the leaders of AI participated in the Dartmouth conference.

I often like to use the epigraph “AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods” crafted by Pamela McCorduck, author of Machines Who Think.

Pam McCorduck is excellently positioned to give us a unique insider’s perspective to the emergence of AI in the United States. McCorduck is not an AI practioner, she’s an author, and she’s also the wife of Joseph Traub, who among other things was Chair of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department, Chair of Columbia University’s Computer Science Department, student, colleague, friend, and mentor to many who were and are key players in the AI field. In the forward to her book, she stated that after AI pioneer John McCarthy near fatal airplane crash in Alaska, she was motivated to write a history of AI before the first generation of American AI pioneers passed away. Her academic and author’s sensibilities provide a broader contextual perspective over a narrow technical practitioner’s. She informs us:

“From the texts we see that artificial intelligence in one form or another is an idea that has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized. Work toward that end has been a splendid effort, the variety of its forms as wondrous as anything humans have conceived; its practitioners as lively a group of poets, dreamers, holy men, rascals, and assorted eccentrics as one could hope to find—not a dullard among them.”

McCorduck reminds us of Homer’s Iliad which introduced us to ‘assorted automata from the workshops of the Greek god Hephaestos (~6th century BC) and Heron of Alexander builds automata (~1st century AD). Interestingly, this is the same who Heron created the first working ‘steam engine’, which was quickly lost to civilization for over a thousand years.

There’s the back-story of why the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was used, McCorduck and others elaborate that McCarthy definitely wanted to gain some signal-to-node differential over competing technical topics and specifically wanted to differentiate the project from similar gatherings usually assembled under the ‘Automata Studies’ or the ‘Cybernetics’ labels. Interestingly, related papers were published as Automata Studies. (AM-34), Volume 3430, edited by McCarthy and Shannon.

Many interesting and prescient discussions and presentations were made and delivered for that conference. Included was the fascinating work of Alan Newell, Shaw, and Herbert Simon demonstrate the Logic Theorist program, typically accorded the moniker of “first working AI program”. Turing however already discussed Intelligent Machinery in 1948.

I have a lot more to say about AI, but not just yet. I would urge you to check Pam’s book.