The document that gave artificial intelligence its name also gave the field its first optimistic deadline. Dated August 31, 1955 and signed by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, the proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth summer study opens by asking that “a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.”
The ambition was not small. The study would “proceed on the basis of 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 proposal listed topics including how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve problems then reserved for humans, and improve themselves.
That this was meant to happen in a single summer, with ten people, is the part worth sitting with. The authors were among the most capable scientists of their generation, and they were not naive. They were estimating the size of a problem that no one had yet worked on - and they underestimated it by decades. Language understanding, abstraction, and self-improvement are still open research frontiers seventy years later.
The Dartmouth proposal is rightly celebrated as the founding document of the field. It is also the first entry in a long ledger of AI timelines that proved far too short. The pattern it set - brilliant people, real progress, and a schedule off by an order of magnitude or more - has recurred so often that it is almost a tradition.