[FoR&AI] The Origins of "Artificial Intelligence" – Rodney Brooks

I mean that both the ways people interpret Shakespeare's meaning when he has Antonio utter the phrase in The Tempest. In one interpretation it is that the past has predetermined the sequence which is about to unfold–and so I believe that how we have gotten to where we are in Artificial Intelligence will determine the directions we take next–so it is worth studying that past. Another interpretation is that really the past was not much and the majority of necessary work lies ahead–that too, I believe. We have hardly even gotten started on Artificial Intelligence and there is lots of hard work ahead. It is generally agreed that John McCarthy coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" in the written proposal2 for a 1956 Dartmouth workshop, dated August 31st, 1955. It is authored by, in listed order, John McCarthy of Dartmouth, Marvin Minsky of Harvard, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM and Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories. Later all but Rochester would serve on the faculty at MIT, although by early in the sixties McCarthy had left to join Stanford University. The nineteen page proposal has a title page and an introductory six pages (1 through 5a), followed by individually authored sections on proposed research by the four authors.