I was born in 1973 and by the 1980s a lot of people were convinced intelligent machines and nearly general purpose AI was just around the corner. There was ton

I was born in 1973 and by the 1980s a lot of people were convinced intelligent machines and nearly general purpose AI was just around the corner. There was tons of university and military funding going into projects to achieve this. Of course, now the idea of that sort of blue-sky research is almost universally dead and the most advanced machine learning will likely be developed at Google as a side effect of much effort put into placing more relevant ads in front of us, which is kind of hilarious.