When I was studying AI at university 20 years ago, there was a running joke in the AI department that things were AI until they worked reliably, then they becam

When I was studying AI at university 20 years ago, there was a running joke in the AI department that things were AI until they worked reliably, then they became Computer Science and the AI folks never got the credit. Like the best jokes there was a grain of truth to it: novel search algorithms, expert systems, heuristic systems, fuzzy logic etc. were all ‘AI’ to begin with. The field really only means trying to get computers to behave intelligently. But people want AI to be somehow mysterious. The current large neural networks are inscrutable enough that the joke may be a reached its limit now (I’m not sure of that though…)