Abstract

Artificial intelligence was defined in 1968 by Marvin Minsky as “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.” Minsky’s definition has proved durable—despite its being remarkably uninformative—not simply because it compresses the purport of Alan Turing’s seminal paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” into a single sentence, but because instead of focusing on what we should say were some computer or other to pass the Turing test, it reinvents the test as a means of confirming the success of a global scientific research program.