[ih] History of AI and Internet

[John Day]

I was told once that there are two forms of AI:
1) Those that are trying to understand and then emulate how the brain works, and
2) Those that are just trying to create something that acts like the brain. (I guess pass the Turing Test, but we are way beyond that.)

Are we talking about the second case as AI?

Is there any real progress on the first?

Take care,
John

> On Jun 23, 2026, at 02:10, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On 23-Jun-26 17:25, william yeager wrote:
>>> On Jun 22, 2026, at 7:54 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> but expert systems were not real AI
>> Rubbish ! (Steven Hawking’s favorite denial). They WERE real AI at the time they existed.
> 
> Fair enough, but all the expert systems I saw were basically rules created by human experts.
> 
>> I worked in the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab at Stanford as well as for the DENDRAL project - AI in chemistry. My area of interest was using organic chemistry along with signal processing to analyze GCMS data with peak analysis gradients to detect inherited rare diseases in children from the fractions of these children’s blood. It worked and these were not heuristics.
> 
> But were they systems that learned, and that detected features that they hadn't been told about in advance?
> 
>> The spectra that were produced were give to several Phd’s in chemistry to identify the compounds, they were stored in a library for future recognition. Is it AI now? No. Was it then. Yes. What we did was state-of-the-art AI between 1970 and 1990 or so.
>> Ed Feigenbaum who is a good friend received the Turing Prize along with Raj Redy for their work on expert systems in 1994.
> 
> Yes, and I didn't mean to insult all that work (so I should have chosen my words more carefully).
> 
>> I am currently writing a history of AI from 1955 to the present from the perspective that it was a Gestalt. Have looked into what was AI for each of the multiple versions over the years. I’ve been in computer science and math for 60 years, lived through these, epochs, and believe me there were battles noted in the press initiated by antagonists who were worried that expert systems were going to replace the experts.
> 
> I never thought that, but it's already happening to a considerable extent with LLMs.
> 
>> AI evolved over the years to where we are now and definitely NOT as a SILO.
> 
> However, multi-layer perceptrons were basically ignored until a few years ago. (That includes me ignoring them when working on speech recognition in the late 1960s, because they were computationally infeasible.)
> 
> Peace
>   Brian
> 
>> Bill
>> ————打🎾————
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>> <Happy year of the horse>
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>> <Bless & Protect all living things>
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