The most important thing about making machines that can think is that they will think different.

Turing’s Strange Seas of Thought North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) Austin, Texas, June 23, 2012 Bruce Sterling Thanks for that introduction, Talking Alan Turing Bot. I’m glad to be here at the summer school to vent some personal issues about logic, language

An AI Winter is a collapse in the perception of artificial intelligence research. The term was coined by analogy with the relentless spiral of a nuclear winter: a chain reaction of pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, followed by a severe cutback in funding, followed by the end of serious research. It first appeared in 1984 as the topic of a public debate at the annual meeting of AAAI (then called the “American Association of Artificial Intelligence”). Two leading AI researchers, Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky, warned the business community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control and that disappointment would certainly follow.