Yeah...we talked a lot about this in the mid-80s with equal parts reverence for the audacity of the goals and Cold War-ish "Mr. President, we must not allow an

Yeah...we talked a lot about this in the mid-80s with equal parts reverence for the audacity of the goals and Cold War-ish "Mr. President, we must not allow an AI gap!". This was when the Japanese "economic miracle" hadn't had it's bubble burst and we thought they were going to steamroll the US. I vividly recall one of the elder AI types finally stepping up and saying (paraphrased) "Guys...don't loose sleep. These guys are talking about things that won't be practical for 20-30 years, if ever. Get back to work.". Considering they were talking about commodity MPP computers, dataflow architectures, logic programming, deep machine learning, etc., he was pretty much dead on. P.S.: Lest you think he was a true visionary, the AI kids went back to work on Symbolics Lisp machines, because we all knew that was the future of AI.