By Rich Heimann How different would we think about artificial intelligence if AI pioneers Allen Newell and Herbert Simon had won support for the seemingly less hype-prone term of “complex information processing,” rather than “artificial intelligence,” which was ultimately adopted by the field?
AI has one advantage in communication: everyone seems to know what it is. It also has a problem. It is a shibboleth that evaded analysis for years, a catchphrase covering everything and explaining little.
The beginnings of AI are rooted in philosophers' attempts to describe human thinking as a symbolic system. Catalan theologian Ramon Llull and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz proposed an alphabet of human thought, the first around 1300 and the second in 1666. Leibniz claimed all ideas are combinations of a small number of simple concepts.
The catchphrase wasn't coined until three hundred years later. In 1955 “artificial intelligence” appears in a proposal for a study by notables John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The resulting two-month workshop in 1956 is the official birthdate of the field. Minsky believed the problem of creating AI would be solved within a generation. He was wrong, obviously, but the complexity of the issues is not a simple function of the chosen rhetoric, with the exception of overly optimistic predictions leading to the first so-called AI Winter.
AI has one advantage in communication: everyone seems to know what it is. It also has a problem. It is a shibboleth that evaded analysis for years, a catchphrase covering everything and explaining little.
The beginnings of AI are rooted in philosophers' attempts to describe human thinking as a symbolic system. Catalan theologian Ramon Llull and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz proposed an alphabet of human thought, the first around 1300 and the second in 1666. Leibniz claimed all ideas are combinations of a small number of simple concepts.
The catchphrase wasn't coined until three hundred years later. In 1955 “artificial intelligence” appears in a proposal for a study by notables John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The resulting two-month workshop in 1956 is the official birthdate of the field. Minsky believed the problem of creating AI would be solved within a generation. He was wrong, obviously, but the complexity of the issues is not a simple function of the chosen rhetoric, with the exception of overly optimistic predictions leading to the first so-called AI Winter.