Part Two: Hope, Hype, and Disappointment - Forward to the Future

The first major wave of AI was based on the premise that knowledge could be "represented" as a set of rules that computers could process with logic. If you could add enough rules, you could eventually produce commonsense knowledge of the world and general intelligence. In its day, it generated great excitement and funding. But its focus was on a process to produce knowledge (logic), not on knowledge itself. The assumption that knowledge consists merely as a set of assertions that could be represented in symbols was flawed. It did not scale; knowledge was never achieved.