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Remember the researchers we met at Dartmouth. They coined the phrase “artificial intelligence,” and some of them helped build one of the first programs to prove theorems. They left that summer convinced they were standing at the beginning of something enormous.
The Dartmouth group, McCarthy, Minsky, Simon, and Newell, were not just theorists. They had already built systems that worked, and from where they stood, the remaining distance looked short.
Ten years, they thought. Twenty at most. Machines would think, reason, and converse. It felt like an engineering problem: hard, yes, but solvable.