The major impact that was then promised
James Lighthill, July 1972 (Science Research Council (UK)). Lighthill was Lucasian Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cambridge. The Science Research Council asked him for this survey, dated July 1972 and published in 1973. It led to deep cuts in British AI funding.
Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey
More from James Lighthill · AI and science · AI and hype · AI and money · Before ChatGPT
Who else?
What it refers to: The high hopes of researchers who entered AI around 1950 and 1960, which the survey says were very far from realised by 1972.
Other voices
- “Lighthill had his shot at AI and missed” John McCarthy,
- “Quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines” Marvin Minsky,
- “Mathematical formalisms fail to capture the significant features of intelligent behaviour” N. Stuart Sutherland,
- “The light it can throw upon human intellectual activity” H. C. Longuet-Higgins,
- “There is a huge amount of hype in this area” Yann LeCun, Researcher,
- “Much of what’s being sold as “AI” today is snake oil” Arvind Narayanan,










