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Arthur C. Clarke predicted a computer-dominated future in the ’70s (2024)
We now live in the midst of an artificial-intelligence boom, but it's hardly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been subject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the early nineteen-fifties.
The program includes interviews with figures now recognized as luminaries in the history of AI: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Terry Winograd, ELIZA creator Joseph Weizenbaum. Clarke not only asks the question now on many minds of what “the people who are only capable of low-grade computer-type work” will do when outstripped by AI, but more deeply underlying ones as well: “What is the purpose of life? But presented with footage of all this now-primitive proto-AI technology — the computer chess tournament, the simulated therapist, the medical-diagnosis assistant, the NASA Mars rover to be launched in the far-flung future of 1986 — they must at least have felt able to entertain the idea that they would live to see an age of machines that could not just think but, as the narrator puts it, possess “the most crucial aspect of common-sense intelligence: the ability to learn.” Perhaps another AI winter will forestall that age yet again — if it’s not already here.
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