When did the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) come into the world? What did it mean and how has it developed since its emergence in the mid-20th century? AI was coined as a term for a field of research in 1955. The young mathematician John McCarthy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, planned a “Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence”. Together with Claude E. Shannon, Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester, he proposed it to the Rockefeller Foundation to fund. Having previously failed with his proposal of “Intelligent Machines” as the title of the volume he and Shannon then published as “Automata Studies”, McCarthy then pushed using the word “intelligence”.

Speculations as to whether machines exhibit intelligent behavior have been made before, and Alan M. Turing discussed this in his article ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ in 1950. The philosopher John Haugeland described AI as a fashion – “Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence” (GOFAI) in his 1985 book Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. In this way, 30 years after the Dartmouth event, he distinguished what have since been called ‘classical’ AI methods of symbolic representation from newer approaches that do not use explicit high-level symbols, such as mathematical optimization, statistical classifiers and neural networks.

These “new-fashioned AI”, “new wave AI” or “new-fangled AI” (NFAI) researches almost totally shape our current concept of AI, mostly without considering its historical developments and meanings. In this lecture, I present a view on the history of AI and these mentioned fashions.