Why the winters mattered

The winters mattered because of what they ruled out.

Two decades of trying to build intelligence from logic and rules had produced real systems, and real evidence that logic and rules alone weren't enough.

That negative result cleared the ground. Researchers who came after could stop debating whether the old approach would eventually work, because the winters had settled it.

What came next, the learning-based AI that eventually became the thing you interact with today, grew directly from that cleared ground.