BACK IN 1983, at the ripe age of 24, I was dazzled by media reports of amazing progress in artificial intelligence (A.I.). Not only could new machines diagnose as well as doctors, they said, but they seemed “almost” ready to displace humans wholesale! So I left graduate school and spent nine years doing A.I. research.
Those forecasts were quite wrong, of course. So were similar forecasts about the machines of the 1960s, 1930s, and 1830s. We are just bad at judging such timetables, and we often mistake a clear view for a short distance. Today we see a new generation of machines, and similar forecasts. Alas, we are
