The Summer Everything Seemed Possible

There is a particular kind of optimism that only exists at the beginning of something.

Before the hard problems reveal themselves. Before the gap between what seemed possible and what actually is becomes clear. When the first results are coming in and everything still feels like it's pointing in one direction.

In the mid-twentieth century, a small group of researchers had that feeling about artificial intelligence. The early signs were genuinely exciting. Machines were doing things that had never been done before, and doing them in ways that felt surprisingly close to reasoning. The question wasn't whether it would work. The question was how long it would take.

That confidence wasn't foolishness. It was the natural response to seeing something real. The problem was that the easy problems had yielded so quickly, it was hard to see that the hard ones were of a completely different kind.

This chapter is about that gap: between a promising beginning and an honest accounting of what it would actually take. Between a foothold on a cliff and a map of how tall the cliff really is.