The First Wave of AI: The Pioneers of the 1960s and 70s

The Dartmouth Workshop: The Birth of a Field

The term “artificial intelligence” was first coined at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. This workshop, organized by John McCarthy, brought together the brightest minds in computer science to lay the groundwork for a new field of study. The attendees were optimistic, believing that a machine as intelligent as a human being was just a few years away.

This optimism fueled the first wave of AI research, which lasted from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. This era was characterized by a focus on symbolic reasoning, or “Good Old-Fashioned AI” (GOFAI). The prevailing belief was that human intelligence could be replicated by manipulating symbols and rules.

Early Successes and Ambitious Goals

The first wave of AI produced some impressive early successes. Programs like the Logic Theorist, which could prove mathematical theorems, and SHRDLU, which could understand and respond to natural language commands in a limited environment, demonstrated the potential of AI.

Researchers were ambitious, tackling problems like machine translation, game playing, and robotics. The development of Lisp, a programming language designed for AI research, was another major achievement of this era.

The AI Winter: A Period of Disillusionment

Despite the early successes, the first wave of AI ultimately failed to live up to its own hype. The limitations of symbolic reasoning became apparent, and progress stalled. The complexity of the real world proved to be a much greater challenge than researchers had anticipated.

By the mid-1970s, funding for AI research had dried up, and the field entered a period of disillusionment known as the “AI winter.” While the first wave of AI may not have achieved its ultimate goal of creating human-level intelligence, it laid the foundation for all the progress that has followed. The pioneers of this era were true visionaries, and their work continues to inspire and inform the field of AI today.