... OK, I'm cutting myself off now - I added one last section, "Miscellaneous additional thoughts", with further thinking inspired by the conversation here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/call-it-ai/#misc-thoughts - plus a closing quote from @glyph
@glyph Added this just now, a thing I learned from https://social.juanlu.space/@astrojuanlu/111714012496518004 which gave me an excuse to link to https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/ (I'll never skip an excuse to link to that)
![Juan Luis pointed me to this fascinating little snippet tucked away in the references section on Wikipedia’s History of Artificial Intelligence, quoting John McCarthy in 1988:
[O]ne of the reasons for inventing the term “artificial intelligence” was to escape association with “cybernetics”. Its concentration on analog feedback seemed misguided, and I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert (not Robert) Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.
So part of the reason he coined the term AI was kind of petty! This is also a neat excuse for me to link to one of my favourite podcast episodes, 99% Invisible on Project Cybersyn (only tangentially related but it’s so good!)](/proxy/post_attachment/144076/1b490c3cd0.png "Juan Luis pointed me to this fascinating little snippet tucked away in the references section on Wikipedia’s History of Artificial Intelligence, quoting John McCarthy in 1988:
[O]ne of the reasons for inventing the term “artificial intelligence” was to escape association with “cybernetics”. Its concentration on analog feedback seemed misguided, and I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert (not Robert) Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.
So part of the reason he coined the term AI was kind of petty! This is also a neat excuse for me to link to one of my favourite podcast episodes, 99% Invisible on Project Cybersyn (only tangentially related but it’s so good!)")
Edited 1y ago
@simon @glyph this is well covered in the older Norvig books (I just looked because I am sitting next to them). PAIP has a very humorous chapter on “GPS" the general problem solver, and AI: A Modern Approach covers the history very well in Section 1.3 (~page 17), and mentions escape from cybernetics, but not the personal stuff.
(I have a bunch of these books, as I would buy anything I could find that would tell me “what computers can do”, and the Internet really wasn't any good yet)
Edited 1y ago