Hi, I’m back again! That was a pretty long and detailed article, but now I’m more confused than before … 😅😅

OK, how can I help?                                                                                

Well, it seems like we’ve been thinking that human level intelligence or AGI would be around the corner for decades …

Sure, people have made a lot of very optimistic predictions in the past                                                       

I saw quotes that people in the ’50s thought it could be done in less than a year!

Well, there was a famous conference in 1956 where some of the most prominent researchers in the area at the time wanted to get together to make a breakthrough …

… but I don’t think they seriously thought at the time they could program an AGI from scratch

But where did all the optimism come from, if it wasn’t all hype? 

It certainly wasn’t “all hype”. There had been fabulous breakthrough just before that …

We went from the idea of a universal computing machine with Turing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

in the ‘30s to actual programmable universal computers in the ‘40s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

And during the early ‘50s people had written a string of working chess and checkers programmes

So? That doesn’t sound very radical to me … isn’t that like the hammers you told me about before?

Sure, but the breakthrough was that it turned out to be possible at all: they were the very first of their kind 🤩🤩

OK, yes, I guess I’m too used to current technology to take a chess computer seriously as a breakthrough in AI …

 Yes, in a sense. What “AGI” wants to be, is an AI that is as intelligent as a human overall, not just for a specific task. But still not necessarily do things in the same way a human does

I get that, and you’re right, we do things differently now, but at the time that was quite radical

People were optimistic because they thought that they could generalize from chess to everything else: all thought would be like a program

That seems like a gigantic unfounded assumption …

Yep, that ship ran into a lot of icebergs, but the assumption wasn’t entirely bogus

How so?  😆

Well, you can think of playing chess as solving a problem: how do I check the king? And an algorithm can take you there: from a set board to victory                                  

But general intelligence could just be like that: an algorithm to solve any problem

Fair enough. So what exactly went wrong?

Ha! The world is not a chessboard! There’s no fixed ruleset of legal moves that you can apply, simulate, run through, and analyze

How did they try to tackle that then?

By turning from engineering to psychology …   😎😎