No Industry Can Afford to Ignore Artificial Intelligence

Sixty years ago this summer, four computer science professors established a summer project aimed at creating "artificial intelligence"--the first time this phrase was ever used. The hope was to figure out how to make machines use language and perform abstract thought. "We think that a significant advance can be made if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer," the now famous project proposal said. In retrospect that was almost hubristically optimistic. We still don't have software that can talk or write as we do, or perform abstract reasoning.