Hitting the Books: Why a Dartmouth professor coined the term 'artificial intelligence'

The term "artificial intelligence," in 1955, was an aspiration rather than a commitment to one method. AI, in this broad sense, involved both discovering what comprises human intelligence by attempting to create machine intelligence as well as a less philosophically fraught effort simply to get computers to perform difficult activities a human might attempt. Only a few of these aspirations fueled the efforts that, in current usage, became synonymous with artificial intelligence: the idea that machines can learn from data. Among computer scientists, learning from data would be de-emphasized for generations. Most of the first half century of artificial intelligence focused on combining logic with knowledge hard-coded into machines.