Pioneers of artificial intelligence believed that a thinking machine could be created.

Artificial intelligence was viewed as the means to make computers smarter than the human brain.

Hubert L. Dreyfus challenged claims made by champions of artificial intelligence.

In 1955, John McCarthy, at the time a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, coined the term “artificial intelligence.” He, along with a dozen or so other pioneers in the emergent field, maintained that machines would one day be able to think and perform tasks as well or even better than humans, a radical concept. Brains were good at recall, abstract thought, and making value judgments, they believed, but they were designed for survival rather than intelligence. The hardware of such a machine—electronic units, analogous to brain cells—didn’t yet exist, but it would in the not-too-distant future, according to this small group of scientists and engineers, the beginnings of AI.

Over the following decade, researchers at a number of institutions, including MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, worked toward achieving that ambitious goal. Progress was slow, but they were convinced that a thinking machine could be created. A computer enabled with artificial intelligence........

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