Like Turing’s 1950 paper, the 1955 proposal for a summer workshop in artificial intelligence seems in retrospect incredibly prescient. The seven problems that McCarthy, Shannon, and their collaborators proposed to study became major pillars of computer science and the field of artificial intelligence:“Theory of the Size of a Calculation” The term “artificial intelligence,” in 1955, was an aspiration rather than a commitment to one method.
Most of the first half century of artificial intelligence focused on combining logic with knowledge hard-coded into machines. Data collected from everyday activities was hardly the focus; it paled in prestige next to logic. In the last five years or so, artificial intelligence and machine learning have begun to be used synonymously; it’s a powerful thought-exercise to remember that it didn’t have to be this way.
Our position is that the appropriate way to describe a piece of problem-solving behavior is in terms of a program: a specification of what the organism will do under varying environmental circumstances in terms of certain elementary information processes it is capable of performing... Digital computers come into the picture only because they can, by appropriate programming, be induced to execute the same sequences of information processes that humans execute when they are solving problems.