The fourth episode of The Machine That Changed the World covers the history of artificial intelligence and the challenges that come from trying to teach computers to think and learn like us.



(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

Key People/Concepts:

Jerome B. Wiesner, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Oliver Selfridge of Lincoln Labs, Claude Shannon, Freddy Robot at the University of Edinburgh, Sir James Lighthill, Terry Winograd‘s SHRDLU, Edward Feigenbaum‘s work on expert systems, Doug Lenat’s Cyc project, Oliver Sacks, neural networks, NETtalk

Interviews:

Marvin Minsky (MIT), Hubert Dreyfus (UC Berkeley), Edward Feigenbaum (Stanford University), Hans Moravec (Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute), Doug Lenat (University of Texas, Austin), Dean Pomerleau (Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute), Terrence Sejnowski (Salk Institute)

Next up…

The last episode: The World at Your Fingertips. Computer networks, including the Internet, and their global impact on communication and privacy.