Interesting excerpt on the origin of the term, "artificial intelligence": Professor Sir James Lighthill: [...] Now, what are the arguments for not calling

Interesting excerpt on the origin of the term, "artificial intelligence": Professor Sir James Lighthill: [...] Now, what are the arguments for not calling this computer science, as I did in my talk and in my report, and calling it artificial intelligence? It's because one wants to make some sort of analogy. One wants to bring in what one can gain by a study of how the brains of living creatures operate. This is the only possible reason for calling it artificial intelligence instead. Professor John McCarthy: Let's see. Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience. The previous bad experience concerns occurred in 1952, when Claude Shannon and I decided to collect a batch of studies, which we hoped would contribute to launching this field. And Shannon thought that artificial intelligence was too flashy a term and might attract unfavorable notice, and so we agreed to call it automata studies. I was terribly disappointed when the papers we received were about automata, and very few of them had anything to do with the goal that at least I was interested in. I decided not to fly any false flags anymore, but to say that this is a study aimed at the long-term goal of achieving human-level intelligence. Since that time, many people have quarreled with the term, but have ended up using it. Newell and Simon, the group at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to use complex information processing, which is certainly a very neutral term, but the trouble was that it didn't identify their field, because everyone would say, well, my information is complex. I don't see what's special about you.