Lesson 218 of 1455
Dartmouth 1956: The Field Gets a Name
A summer workshop in New Hampshire gave artificial intelligence its name and its optimism problem.
Builders · AI Foundations · ~13 min read
The Summer That Named a Field
In the summer of 1956, a small group gathered at Dartmouth College for a workshop organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence in the proposal, reportedly to avoid overlap with Norbert Wiener's cybernetics.
The proposal's opening claim was breathtaking. It stated that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence could in principle be so precisely described that a machine could be made to simulate it.
What they hoped to solve in eight weeks
- Natural language understanding
- Abstract concept formation
- Self-improving programs
- Randomness and creativity
- How neural networks could form concepts
They solved none of it in the summer. Some of it remains open today. But the agenda they set, and the name they chose, defined the field for decades.
“We propose that a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out.”
Key terms in this lesson
The big idea: AI was born with enormous ambition and a naming ceremony. Both the ambition and the name have stuck around, for better and for worse.
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