Long-term Trends in the Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has a long history of boom and bust cycles. During A.I. booms, money flows through universities and industry labs, fueling promised advances that often sound like magic, if not panacea. Extreme optimism was particularly common in the field's early years. In 1960, for example, A.I. pioneer Herbert Simon suggested that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do," a claim echoed by the founder of the field, Marvin Minsky, in 1961. Despite the advances that have occured since that time -- most recently, breakthroughs in neural networks, a form of machine learning inspired by the biological structure of the brain -- today's leading researchers tend to be more circumspect about the potential of artificial intelligence in the near-term.