Chapter 3 - The Golden Era

The summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College gave artificial intelligence its name and its founding ambition: that every aspect of human intelligence could be precisely described and mechanically reproduced. The optimism was genuine and, within its own frame of reference, earned — the Logic Theorist was proving mathematical theorems, and ELIZA was conducting conversations that made intelligent adults feel genuinely heard. Simultaneously, Kenneth Cooper's 1968 aerobics research found squash earning the highest cardiovascular scores of any sport, and the professional class flooded into courts across North America with champions like Barrington and Hunt giving the sport its human face. Both communities were performing brilliantly within bounded domains and beginning, without quite knowing it, to encounter the costs of those boundaries.