5.2 The Americas — The Forge and the Forgetting

The Forge and the Forgetting: The Summers, Winters, and Invisible Women of American Artificial IntelligenceIn 1956, twenty-one researchers gathered at Dartmouth College for an eight-week summer conference. They had an ambitious goal: create a "machine capable of simulating every aspect of human intelligence." They thought they could do it in one generation. They were wrong — by a great deal.American artificial intelligence experienced summers and winters. The Dartmouth summer, then the first winter when funding collapsed in the 1970s. The expert systems summer, then their collapse when conventional machines caught up. Finally, the deep learning summer — the one still ongoing.But the American history of AI is also a history of forgetting.In February 1946, the army presented ENIAC to the press. In the background of the photos, six women manipulated cables — Betty Holberton, Kay McNulty, and their colleagues. They were not introduced. It took fifty years for their names to be learned.You will also discover Mexico, which received its first computer in 1958 and created the first computer science master's in Latin America. Argentina and its ComIC pioneers — Clarisa Cortes, Cristina Zoltan, Liana Lew, Noemi Garcia. Brazil, which manufactured sixty-seven percent of its computers locally in 1982.And Chile. Salvador Allende. Fernando Flores who wrote to Stafford Beer. The Cybersyn project — "a sort of socialist Internet, decades ahead of its time," according to The Guardian. The futuristic operations room, destroyed by the September 11, 1973 coup.America forged artificial intelligence. It also forged forgetting.