In 1955, John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” (AI) in a grant proposal that he co-wrote with his colleague Marvin Minsky and a group of other computer scientists seeking funding for a workshop they hoped to hold at Dartmouth College the following summer. Their choice of words set in motion decades of semantic squabbles (“Can machines think?”) and fueled anxieties over malicious robots such as HAL 9000, the sentient computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the cyborg assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. If McCarthy and Minsky had chosen a blander phrase—say, “automaton studies”—the concept might not have appealed as much to Hollywood producers and journalists, even as the technology developed apace.
