Machines doing things that would count as intelligence if a person did them — and the branch of computer science that builds them. John McCarthy coined the name in the 1955 proposal for a Dartmouth summer workshop, choosing it partly to keep the new field clear of cybernetics.
John McCarthy, with Minsky, Rochester and Shannon as co-authors of the 1955 proposal.
// Where it sits
Seventy years of definitional argument follow from starting at the right-hand end.
What it really means
The phrase was not coined at a conference. It was coined in a funding application for one, dated 31 August 1955 — nine and a half months before anyone met.
The document is A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, signed by J. McCarthy (Dartmouth), M. L. Minsky (Harvard), N. Rochester (IBM) and C. E. Shannon (Bell Labs). It opens with a sentence that has aged into comedy: We propose 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.
Two months. Ten people. Seventy years later, still going.
McCarthy is credited with the phrase, and by his own later account it was chosen partly for what it wasn't — a name that kept the new field clear of cybernetics, the established discipline next door. By his own account he chose it to escape that association, and to avoid having either to accept Norbert Wiener as a guru or to argue with him. Which is worth sitting with: the term everyone argues about the boundaries of was picked to stay off somebody else's, in a document whose job was to get money.
But the founders were not vague about the claim. The proposal's central sentence is still the field's whole bet:
The study is to 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.
Read it carefully, because everything since is a footnote to it. It is a conjecture — explicitly labelled as one. It says in principle, not in practice. And it makes an enormous prior commitment: that intelligence is the kind of thing that can be precisely described at all.
Every serious argument about AI's limits — about understanding, about consciousness, about whether the current systems are doing the thing or performing it — is an argument about that one sentence. Nobody has proven it. Nobody has refuted it.
It is still, seventy years on, a conjecture in a grant proposal.
Where it comes from
Joined as a field name in the 1955 proposal. It was a naming decision made for a funding proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, and what it covers has been argued over ever since.
Myths & misconceptions
'Artificial intelligence' was coined at the 1956 Dartmouth conference.
It was coined in the proposal FOR it, dated 31 August 1955 — nine and a half months before the workshop happened. Four authors signed the document; McCarthy, then at Dartmouth, is credited with the phrase itself.
The founders were vague about what they were claiming.
They were startlingly explicit, and the sentence is still the field's central bet: 'The study is to 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.' Every argument about AI's limits since 1955 is an argument about that one sentence.
Compare & contrast
AI vs machine learning
AI is the 1955 ambition — simulate any feature of intelligence. Machine learning is one method that turned out to work. The names get swapped commercially because the older one sells better.
| // | Artificial intelligence | Machine learning |
|---|---|---|
| Is a | Goal | Method |
| Named | 1955 | 1959 |
| Scope | All of intelligence | Learning from data |
| Falsifiable | Barely | Yes |
How it connects
- Consciousnessthe question the 1955 conjecture quietly assumes away.
- Ai Slopwhat the field's success looks like from the receiving end.
Tell it apart
Questions people ask
- Who coined the term artificial intelligence?
- John McCarthy, in the 31 August 1955 proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, co-authored with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon.
- What was the Dartmouth proposal's core claim?
- That every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. That conjecture has never been proven or refuted.
- Was the term coined in 1955 or 1956?
- 1955 — the proposal predates by nine and a half months the workshop it was written to fund.