Rodney Brooks on Artificial Intelligence – Econlib

When we see some new technology, it's very surprising to us, and we immediately think of how it's going to be used; and we tend to think that it's going to be quite fantastic. But, in the long run, we sort of discount how much it is going to change the world. And I think computers are the prime example of that. If you go back to the late 1950s and early 1960s and look at movies that mention computers, they were all-powerful, going to do everything. So, there were these--built usually using vacuum tubes. They had the computing power of what you would find in a birthday card that plays a tune when you open it.