Connectionists: FW: AI at 50 videos...

Fri Aug 21 00:20:02 EDT 2026

Hava, you are not dead. Those statements of Marvin Minsky and Jerry Fodor reflect the bitterness of those days. I have also heard a connectionist call Marvin a “devil” in an acceptance speech for an award.

Asim Roy
Professor, Information Systems
Arizona State University
Lifeboat Foundation Bios: Professor Asim Roy<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!NHg1P4byXZZmMFLMgr8A4dQNxSlqyvsqWef4wrPXtCXR0f0bo0eMm-rIF8G6ZV0$>
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From: Hava Siegelmann <hava at umass.edu>
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2026 8:29 AM
To: Asim Roy <ASIM.ROY at asu.edu>
Cc: Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu>; Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>; director at inc.ucsd.edu; connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: FW: AI at 50 videos...

This is amazing I love it - dead !

On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 8:30 AM Asim Roy <ASIM.ROY at asu.edu<mailto:ASIM.ROY at asu.edu>> wrote:
I had some communication with Marvin Minsky and Jerry Fodor years ago. Here are two quotes from them:

1. Marvin Minsky: "Don’t pay any attention to the critics. Don’t even ignore them.” -By Sam Goldwyn

2. Jerry Fodor: “Arguing with Connectionists is like arguing with zombies; both are dead, but neither has noticed it.”

And here’s a note from a neuroscience pioneer Horace Barlow, Darwin’s great-grandson (Horace Barlow - Wikipedia<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Barlow>), winner of many neuroscience prizes. Without his pioneering work poking into frog brains with microelectrodes, we would NOT have AI as we see it today. The grandmother cell theory essentially points to where cognition exists in an abstract form. And there is plenty of neurophysiological evidence for such single cell abstractions, starting with line orientation cells.
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Dear Asim
Yes, I would like to join your group, though I would (again) like to make it clear that the grandmother cell theory is not mine, though I still hold that something conforming amazingly well to what was conceptualised by Jerry Lettvin 50 years ago, really does exist!
I am still actively interested in the topic, and have just sent off the final proofs of an essay bearing on it. I shall send you a copy of the final proof as soon as I am allowed to circulate it, and of course the more widely discussed it is the better pleased I shall be, though I fear that what I have written will not be universally accepted, at least at first!
Best regards
Horace
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Asim Roy
Professor, Information Systems
Arizona State University
Lifeboat Foundation Bios: Professor Asim Roy<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!NHg1P4byXZZmMFLMgr8A4dQNxSlqyvsqWef4wrPXtCXR0f0bo0eMm-rIF8G6ZV0$>
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From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>> On Behalf Of Gary Marcus
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2026 11:23 AM
To: Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu<mailto:jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>>
Cc: director at inc.ucsd.edu<mailto:director at inc.ucsd.edu>; connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: FW: AI at 50 videos...

yep: neural networks ascended, pushed symbols out of the way, and then symbols came back relabeled as harnesses, loops code interpreters, and tools.

neurosymbolic AI, the hybrid of the two approaches, clearly beat either of the two alternatives on their own.

claude code, biggest recent advance, shows that pretty clearly, when you look under the hood.

gary

On Aug 19, 2026, at 10:16 AM, Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu<mailto:jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>> wrote:

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

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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><mailto: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<mailto: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/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/sites.dartmouth.edu/cybenko/dartmouth-ai50-videos/__;!!Mih3wA!HX5M154b9l4fIHZdxakK00FZ4H1IPqVHrV_pC-lh-4XwoZ6CvDp7SyXZ-ObDk5oWYIct3ux47KDlf3KvyIoMq7VLCwxY0JhC$>

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<mailto:gvc at dartmouth.edu>

FAX:            603 646-9024

Cell:           603 369-1133

Assistant:      Ellen Wirta, 603 646-9672, Ellen.K.Wirta at Dartmouth.edu<mailto:Ellen.K.Wirta at Dartmouth.edu>

--
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--

--

Hava T. Siegelmann, Ph.D.

Provost Professor

Director, BINDS Lab (Biologically Inspired Neural Dynamical Systems)

Dept. of Computer Science

Core member, Program of Neuroscience and Behavior

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Amherst, MA, 01003

Phone: 413-540-6826

LAB WEBSITE: http://binds.cs.umass.edu/
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