This is really interesting! One random piece of context that's hard to glean from the news article that's reproduced about Arthur L. Samuel's disagreement with

This is really interesting! One random piece of context that's hard to glean from the news article that's reproduced about Arthur L. Samuel's disagreement with Wiener is that Samuel was the author of the checkers-playing program that Wiener mentioned (that was able to beat its author at the game). If I understand their respective positions correctly, Wiener seems to have thought that the fact that the program could outplay its author was at least an example of a disturbing phenomenon about the difficulty of pretending and controlling machines' behavior, while Samuel -- the program author -- felt that he had a good understanding of how the program beat him, and that it did so only according to heuristics and methods that he had consciously devised and explicitly programmed into it. So there was no conceptual problem for him in understanding the machine's behavior, even though it was concretely better at something than he was. I guess we still have fairly analogous arguments about AI safety and explainability in the present day.