Why Did a Prominent Science Writer Come To Doubt the AI Takeover?

When I started writing about science decades ago, artificial intelligence seemed ascendant. IEEE Spectrum, the technology magazine for which I worked, produced a special issue on how AI would transform the world. I edited an article in which computer scientist Frederick Hayes-Roth predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance and other professions. But that year, 1984, ushered in an AI winter, in which innovation stalled and funding dried up. By 1998, problems like non-recurrent engineering had begun to be recognized: "Algorithms that can perform a specialized task, like playing chess, cannot be easily adapted for other purposes."