Dartmouth Marks 70 Years of 'Artificial Intelligence'
Dartmouth College is marking the 70th anniversary of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, where the term “artificial intelligence” was first coined. Researchers and thought leaders convened to reflect on the field's rapid progress and to debate its ethical, societal, and technical challenges.
The 1956 event was an eight-week brainstorming session organized by four academics: John McCarthy, then a young mathematics professor at Dartmouth, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM, and Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Their foundational proposal was based on the "conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." The term "artificial intelligence" itself was coined by McCarthy, who chose it to distinguish the new field from the existing areas of cybernetics and automata theory. The project's budget was a modest $13,500, provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, which covered the expenses for the approximately ten participants who attended the extended workshop. The initial decades after the workshop saw the rise of "expert systems" and the first chatbot, ELIZA, in 1966. The field experienced periods of reduced funding known as "AI winters" when progress couldn't match the initial ambitious predictions. It wasn't until IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 that AI recaptured widespread public attention. The current AI boom is largely driven by deep learning, a technique that allows systems to learn from vast amounts of data. This has led to significant breakthroughs like Google's AlphaGo defeating the world's top Go player in 2016 and the recent explosion of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. These tools can create human-like text, images, and code, moving AI from a specialized tool to a mainstream technology. Today, Dartmouth continues to be a hub for AI innovation. The Dartmouth Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence (CPHAI) is developing AI to personalize healthcare and improve patient outcomes. Other labs are focusing on human-AI interaction, robotics, and ensuring the ethical and secure use of AI technologies. Current projects at Dartmouth include "Evergreen," an AI chatbot designed to support student mental well-being by delivering cognitive behavioral therapy. Researchers are also developing AI to help preserve endangered languages and studying how generative AI impacts the labor market.
