The fifth generation story was hyped to the gills in European (and I assume US) AI research circles at the time to increase public funding. It was a bit funny a

The fifth generation story was hyped to the gills in European (and I assume US) AI research circles at the time to increase public funding. It was a bit funny as we were all knees deep into 'nouvelle AI' as a reaction to the crafted reasoning/logic from before, so a thin line had to be walked between 'we need to fund this emergence/embodied/subsymbolic research because the logic/symbolic reasoning stuff is a deadend' and 'those Japanese with their logic/symbolic reasoning approach are going to eat our lunch if you do not give us more money'. Good times were had.