Superintelligent, Amoral, and Out of Control - Issue 84: Outbreak

In the summer of 1956, a small group of mathematicians and computer scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to embark on the grand project of designing intelligent machines. The ultimate goal, as they saw it, was to build machines rivaling human intelligence. As the decades passed and AI became an established field, it lowered its sights. There were great successes in logic, reasoning, and game-playing, but stubborn progress in areas like vision and fine motor-control. This led many AI researchers to abandon their earlier goals of fully general intelligence, and focus instead on solving specific problems with specialized methods.