Part III · Era 2 — Birth and Optimism (1956–1973)

draft

AI becomes a field with its own name. Full of symbolic advances and ambitious promises — some that would take decades (or more) to be fulfilled.

Narrative

In the summer of 1956, at Dartmouth, a group of researchers officially founds "Artificial Intelligence". The dominant paradigm is the symbolic one: intelligence as search and manipulation of symbols. The first programs that prove theorems, play games and converse appear. Optimism is enormous — human-level AI was predicted "within a generation". The first trainable network, the Perceptron, energizes the connectionist strand, until a 1969 book exposes its limits and cools the area.

Milestones

  • 1956 — Dartmouth Conference · McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon, Rochester ·

    coins the term "Artificial Intelligence"; founding milestone of the field.

  • 1956 — *Logic Theorist* · Newell & Simon · proves logic theorems;

    considered the first AI program.

  • 1958 — Perceptron · Frank Rosenblatt · first trainable neural network;

    learns to classify by adjusting weights.

  • 1958 — LISP · John McCarthy · the language of symbolic AI for decades.
  • 1965 — *General Problem Solver* · Newell & Simon · generic solving through

    means-ends search.

  • 1966 — ELIZA · Joseph Weizenbaum · conversational "psychotherapist";

    exposes how humans project intelligence (the ELIZA effect).

  • 1969 — *Perceptrons* · Minsky & Papert · proves the limits of the

    single-layer perceptron (XOR); contributes to the 1st connectionist winter.

  • 1966–1972 — Shakey, the robot · SRI · first robot to perceive, plan and

    act; birthplace of planning (STRIPS).

People

John McCarthy (1927–2011) — coined "AI"; created LISP. Champion of the logical/symbolic paradigm. 🖼️ Photo F-III.4.

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) — cofounder of the MIT AI Lab. Theorist of the mind as a society of agents; coauthor of Perceptrons.

Allen Newell & Herbert Simon — Logic Theorist and GPS. The "physical symbol system" hypothesis; Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) — inventor of the Perceptron. Pioneer of connectionist learning; rehabilitated by the deep learning revolution. 🖼️ Photo F-III.5 (Perceptron Mark I).

Curiosities

  • The Perceptron's headline hype (1958). A New York Times report opened by

    announcing a prototype computer that would one day "walk, talk, see, write, reproduce and be conscious of its existence." Rosenblatt said his machine would be the first to "think as the human brain" — one that "would make mistakes but grow wiser with experience." It could, in fact, only tell simple cards apart.

  • Why it's called ELIZA. Weizenbaum named his 1966 chatbot after *liza

    Doolittle* the flower girl of My Fair Lady (Audrey Hepburn) who, by changing her speech and manners, passes for a member of the elite — a fitting name for a program built to simulate attention with simple rules. Some psychiatrists of the day predicted automated psychotherapy "within a few years" — something today's chatbots are again attempting.

  • A contested origin myth. The Dartmouth-as-birth story is questioned by

    historians: a 2023 article in BJHS Themes argues AI's foundations also trace to industrialization, militarism and colonialism — from mineral supply chains to colonial logics of classifying people and territories — not to a single academic workshop. As historian Victor Sobreira (USP) puts it, Dartmouth "was a founding myth, but in practice a two-month meeting without much concrete progress."

Source: curiosities surfaced by the BBC News Brasil report *"Máquinas podem pensar? Os 70 anos de história que levaram à inteligência artificial dos dias atuais"* (Luiz Fernando Toledo, 2025) — which interviewed Anderson Rocha (Unicamp) and Victor Sobreira (USP) and drew on Karen Hao's Empire of AI — cross-checked against primary sources.

🎨 Figure F-III.6 — The Dartmouth summer. Brief: illustrated scene of a 1950s seminar room (blackboard with "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE" written on it), figures debating; alongside, the Perceptron Mark I (panel of wires and potentiometers) and the Shakey robot. Optimistic, retro tone.

Connection to the Compendium: the paradigm of this era is the Symbolic AI of the gallery ../02-types-of-ai/01-symbolic.kmd; the Perceptron is the seed of the connectionist paradigm (../02-types-of-ai/02-connectionist.kmd).