Connectionists: [BULK] [EXTERNAL] Re: FW: AI at 50 videos...

[Miroslav Karny]

​Dear all,
just for fun and a bit of thinking on AI. Almost
surely you know that the term “robot” appeared in R.U.R. a famous 1920 science
fiction play by Karel Čapek. It is
less known that in 1922 he published a science fiction
novel The Absolute at Large (Továrna na absolutno in Czech) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Absolute_at_Large.
I believe that it is highly relevant for the research community (especially
chapter 14, if you map the word “tacks” on LLMs research outputs  … )


                                                    Best regards Miroslav Kárný
                                                                              https://utia.cas.cz/en/people/?pid=109



Dne Čt, 08/20/2026 12:22 odp., Juergen Schmidhuber <juergen.schmidhuber at kaust.edu.sa> napsal(a):
> Indeed, there was AI long before the 1956 AI meeting, and it was often called cybernetics.
> 
> Fun fact: cybernetics was closer to modern AI than what the 1956 AI guys proposed. 
> 
> In 1914, the Spaniard Leonardo Torres y Quevedo became the 20th century's first AI pioneer when he built the first working chess end game player (back then chess was considered as an activity restricted to the realms of intelligent creatures). 
> 
> Quevedo’s machine was still considered impressive decades later when another AI pioneer—Norbert Wiener [WI48]—played against it at the 1951 Paris conference on calculating machines and human thought, now often viewed as the first conference on AI [AI51][BRO21][BRU4].
> 
> “One reason for inventing the term [AI] was to escape association with cybernetics,” as McCarthy once bluntly explained. “I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.” Source: https://caseorganic.substack.com/p/inside-the-very-human-origin-of-the
> 
> Stephen also mentions "the connectionist revival in the 1980s (sorry Juergen).” 
> 
> This revival was at best a rehash of the deep learning revolution that started in Ukraine in 1965.
> 
> For example, Ivakhnenko's 1971 paper [DEEP2] (in English) described a deep learning network with 8 layers. Application: predict the next token! Where the tokens described the British economy. 
> 
> 
> 
> References taken from: 
> 
> [DLH] J.S. Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning. Technical Report IDSIA-22-22, IDSIA, Switzerland, 2022, updated 2025. Preprint arXiv:2212.11279. https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html
>  
> 
> Cheers,
> Juergen
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > On 19. Aug 2026, at 16:24, Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> > 
> > You don't often get email from jose at rubic.rutgers.edu. Learn why this is important
> > Yes, historically this was an important meeting --and indeed the term AI was coined by John McCarthy who with several others put together the 1955 meeting;  McCarthy also invented LISP after this meeting.   Part of the AI meeting at DM was political. McCarthy deliberately chose "Artificial Intelligence" partly to distance the new effort from Wiener's cybernetics and the neural network tradition. Which was thematic in the MACY meetings.. which ended in 1953--2 years before the "AI" meeting.  McCarthy wanted to stake out a separate field with a symbolic/logical emphasis (in contrast to McCulloch and Pitts). So the naming wasn't just descriptive; it was a bit of a territorial move that arguably sidelined neural networks for decades until the connectionist revival in the 1980s (sorry Juergen).  And the more recent revolution associated with DL and LLMs more specifically.  In the 1970s, this fueled the long term debate in Cognitive Science on Symbols/Rules vs Vectors/NN.     
> > Well at least we know how that turned out.
> > Stephen
> > 
> > On 8/17/26 13:30, Terry Sejnowski wrote:
> >> Jean-Marc -
> >> 
> >> I was there and gave a talk, the only one on neural networks.  I learned a lot from the other speakers.
> >> 
> >> I just listened to the questions at the end of my talk.  I pretty much predicted what was going to happen in AI and thought it would take 50 years.  I was wrong, it took less than 20 years.
> >> 
> >> One of the questions at the end was about intelligent aliens who appear and don't have human brains.
> >> This was a set piece in my recent book on ChatGPT and the Future of AI, where ChatGPT is the alien.
> >> 
> >> I gave my version of that meeting in my first book on the Deep Learning Revolution.  Every talk that reported progress did so because they had enough data to analyze, including Gene Charniak who was trying to parse sentences and Takeo Kanade working on computer vision (These two talks are not included in the list).  At the end Marvin Minsky accused them for just working on applications, not real AI.
> >> 
> >> Terry
> >> 
> >> ------
> >> 
> >> On 8/17/2026 9:18 AM, Fellous, Jean-Marc wrote:
> >>> In case you did not see this: Some amazing lectures and (now historical) perspectives… the most interesting parts are when they tried and predicted the future of AI!
> >>>  From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of George Cybenko
> >>> Sent: Monday, August 17, 2026 6:00 AM
> >>> To: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
> >>> Subject: Connectionists: AI at 50 videos...
> >>>  In 2006, we held a 50th anniversary conference at Dartmouth to commemorate
> >>> the historic 1956 meeting that coined the term "artificial intelligence."  At that time,
> >>> five of the surviving original participants attended.  Today they are all gone.
> >>>  I just recently posted videos of the talks from the AI at 50 meeting at
> >>>  https://sites.dartmouth.edu/cybenko/dartmouth-ai50-videos/
> >>>  INobody foresaw what is happening in AI today and in fact,
> >>> there were several digs against neural networks etc.  
> >>>  Enjoy!
> >>>  Regards
> >>> George Cybenko
> >>> -- 
> >>> George Cybenko, Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering
> >>> Dartmouth College, 8000 Cummings Hall, Hanover NH 03755 USA
> >>>  
> >>> email:          gvc at dartmouth.edu
> >>> FAX:            603 646-9024
> >>> Cell:           603 369-1133
> >>> Assistant:      Ellen Wirta, 603 646-9672, Ellen.K.Wirta at Dartmouth.edu
> >> 
> > -- 
> > <signature.jpg>
> 
> 
> 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20260820/a196241a/attachment-0001.html>