Psychology Today | 24.07.2026 02:16
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.
