This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Herbert Simon wrote, “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – H. A. Simon was quoted with a prediction,  “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do” in the 1960s. He wrote this in his “The New Science of Management Decision”

Herbert Simon was an American economist, political scientist, and cognitive scientist. In addition to Logic Theorist, he was known for research into decision-making in organisations and theories of bound rationality and satisficing. He worked at Carnegie Mellon University for the majority of his career. Simon received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978, and the Turing Award in 1975 for contributions to AI, human cognition, and list processing.

His prediction was stated in his work in the 60s, after the bloom of AI development in the advent of the Dartmouth Conference. Optimism was running high, and advocates and academics for AI envisioned a romantic vision of what it could be. However, his prediction did not come to fruition, as AI development suffered stagnations and the like.

This quote was an event in the history of AI due to its display of the sentiments of optimism of the time. Herbert Simon is also a notable found father of AI. His quotation is still deliberated about to this day.