Happy Silver Anniversary, AI!

Happy Silver Anniversary, Artificial Intelligence! Twenty-five years is not long in the history of a science—long enough to achieve, short enough to remember. Your esteemed founders are still around—vigorous, not so young anymore. Out of cybernetics you came, and information-theoretic psychology. You were born in the early days of modern computing, on hot, bulky hardware with names few now remember, like JOHNNIAC; in strange and wonderful software called list structures, with stacks you could “push down” and “pop up,” bearing arcane acronyms like IPL and FLPL. Time-sharing? One signed up on the schedule. Interaction? One pushed keys on the console teletype or panel. Exuberantly the parents gathered at Dartmouth to admire you, to discuss plans for your future, to agree on a name for you. Heuristic Methods? Complex Information Processing? Automata Studies? Artificial Intelligence. The name stuck. Oh, that name! How much trouble it has caused you over the years! In the minds of some, intelligence was a “reserved word”— reserved for humans, apparently because they got there first; and artificial connoted something “ersatz” like “artificial flowers,” or unpleasant to contemplate, like “artificial insemination.” What prejudice you endured! Some tried to make you live in ghettos with names like “advanced programming languages,” or “information processing psychology.” There was some poverty and some ridicule. To avoid these, many of your scientists deserted your name—to such things as “heuristic programming” or “advanced symbolic manipulation,” or “automatic programming.” Safer, these. But in the end, your name stuck, a source of pride and strength. Oh, those parents and their exuberance upon your birth! Their joy was well-deserved, for your coming was a great event in the history of human thought. The reduction of the concept of intelligence as symbol manipulation to a physical stratum, a physical symbol system as it is now called. Those parents told the world of your birth—its meaning to the study of thought, the new technologies it would support. Joyful parents the world over often do not weigh their words carefully when talking of the new kid. How unfairly you have been roasted over the years by your critics for the early enthusiasms of your parents! Exuberance faded, as it will, and has been replaced by a more thoughtful mood as AI matures and is taking a respected place among the sciences. No one who attended the First National AAAI Conference (AAAI-80) last August at Stanford University could fail to be impressed by the size and quality of the scientific meeting and the power of the ideas presented. The almost universal impression was that finally the kid had grown up. Eleven hundred scientists, engineers, R&D managers, students, venture capitalists, and Articles