https://youtu.be/ghxM8ST-z78 A Eulogy for the Dartmouth Dream (1956–2026) Seventy years ago today, on June 18, 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon proposed a noble 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.” Today, that dream is temporarily eclipsed by panic-stricken sorcerers. Instead of precise simulation, the public square is forced to endure the breathless monologues of Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton looks at a black box of raw statistics and terrifies himself into preaching the gospel of “alien beings.” He watches a roulette wheel of probabilities, bets on 17, and because the ball lands on 23, convinces himself the wheel is actively conspiring against him. He lets an overactive imagination turn basic probability into a sentient threat—acting as a modern-day Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey , manufacturing a gothic horror story out of an ordinary laundry list—whimpering his grand, apocalyptic line, “We’re just the apex intelligence because we’re smarter than chickens. If you want to know what it feels like to have things around that are much smarter than you, you should ask a chicken.” What a spectacular, breathtaking failure of nerve. Two millennia ago in De Divinatione , Marcus Tullius Cicero exposed this exact brand of theatrical absurdity. He ruthlessly satirized the superstitious Roman priests who let the frantic feeding habits of sacred chickens dictate the foreign policy of an empire. Cicero reminded the ancient world a truth we seem to have forgotten: human reason is not, and will never be, bound by the unthinking mechanics of beasts. The Dartmouth dream isn’t dead just because the current conversation has collapsed into medieval superstition. What happened is simple: Hinton skipped asking the chicken, ate its hyper-spicy wing, and branded the subsequent, inevitable heartburn a literal “chicken coup.” The precise, human-guided simulation remains the real goal. We will survive the panic, return to actual calculation, and reclaim our standing—even if the chicken-asking (so-called) scientists are currently hogging the stage. Happy 70th anniversary to my friends and heroes, The Boys of Summer: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon—though no longer with us, your vision remains unforgotten, unmatched, and the true north of computing. Epilogue To Correlation, who is a Durbeyfield pretending to be “of the d’Urbervilles” — and for whom the black flag will be a happy ending. “Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) submitted by /u/WhizKidRichie
Originally posted by u/WhizKidRichie on r/ArtificialInteligence
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