Inside the Very Human Origin of the Term “Artificial Intelligence”

Cayce’s Substack

SubscribeSign in

Inside the Very Human Origin of the Term “Artificial Intelligence”<br>AI's Seven Decade Boom/Bust Cycle

Amber Case<br>Aug 04, 2026

Share

With so much growing interest and fear around AI, it may be helpful to know some history around the term, how it came to be ,  and why it keeps getting buzzed about. Now 70 years old, “artificial intelligence” was actually first coined due to the most uniquely human of motives: Ego and competitiveness.

Back row, from left to right: Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy. Frontrow, from left to right: Ray Solomonoff, Peter M. Milner, and Claude Shannon.<br>It was in the Summer of 1955 in New England. Computer scientist John McCarthy of Dartmouth was preparing a research proposal with Marvin Minsky (Harvard), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). At the time, their study would usually fall squarely in the category of “cybernetics”, i.e. automated systems. But that posed a problem.<br>Cayce’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

The discipline of cybernetics was first formulated in an incredibly influential book of the same name by Norbert Wiener, a professor at nearby MIT. Much of his early cybernetics work focused on trying to control and automate systems. And while we rightly worry about the use of AI-guided weaponry now, it was Wiener who created one of the very first automated weapon systems — way back during World War II.

1948: Norbert Wiener Issues “Cybernetics”, the First Widely Distributed Book on Electronic Computing.<br>With the rise of the Cold War, Wiener became an incredibly influential — many say domineering — force around any conversation about the future of computing. That was often quite literally the case: If there was a cybernetics conference scheduled near him in Cambridge, Norbert was notorious for showing up in person and lecturing everyone at length.<br>How to hold an academic conference around computing, but keep Wiener from coming?<br>Simple: Come up with another term, and use that to advertise the conference.<br>“One reason for inventing the term [AI] was to escape association with cybernetics,” as McCarthy once bluntly explained. “I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.”<br>So in a very real sense, AI started out as a term of distraction, not clarity. Created to position itself apart from cybernetics, it was coined so broadly that roughly any automated computer system can be called artificial intelligence.

The placard commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dartmouth’s Summer Research Project consisting of a “2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” in 1956.<br>It’s why “AI” remained such a compelling marketing term through the decades. The explosive growth of ChatGPT since 2022 has generated such excitement, it’s easy to forget another AI-related product enjoyed similar buzz less than a decade ago.<br>But it’s true: back in 2014, AI hype orbited around voice-activated personal assistants, with Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana leading the charge. As with other “truthy” technology, Hollywood turbo-charged this excitement, with Jarvis from the Iron Man movies and the Scarlet Johannsen-voiced AI depicted in Her. “Personal assistant AI is going to change everything!” briefly became the grand pronouncement for that time (almost 10 years from the date of this op-ed).<br>Back then, I began getting pitches from large companies about designing what seemed like magic systems with sprinkles of “AI” on top. When probed further, however, it appeared that the executives behind these proposals were not actually interested in artificial intelligence, but in making sure their product offerings seemed fresh and competitive. They’d read in various pop tech magazines that AI was something they needed to pay attention to, but they hadn’t looked deeply into it. As a result, they became impatient when I tried to take them through the details of potential implementations.<br>As this was shortly after my TED talk on cyborg anthropology, I was actively encouraged to ride that era’s AI hype wave.

An article in Wired in 2014 building on the AI assistant hype delivered in the film “Her”. “Her” was far from the first fictional tale to include humans falling in love with automations. The 1968 story “La Nuit des temps” (English: “The Ice People”) by French author René Barjavel, includes a subplot in which the protagonist in a relationship with “Blanche” his car’s computerized female voice.<br>“Why aren’t you speaking more about AI?” one prominent consultant put it to me during an arts festival. “I make half a million a year. People are scared about it and you can make money from their fear. It’s confusing and scary for them, so I give them information.”...