James Lighthill

By the early 1970s the Science Research Council in Britain started to become concerned by the number of funding requests it was receiving from the various artificial intelligence and computer science groups and commissioned a report from Sir James Lighthill, an applied mathematician and former director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. At the time, the Edinburgh group wanted funding to buy a much more powerful state-of-the-art computer. Lighthill approached the field of ai research with deep scepticism, perhaps influenced by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and his highly contentious 1965 paper ‘Alchemy and ai’. Dreyfus, based at mit, had been commissioned by the rand Corporation in the usa to review the topic. His report, when released, proved to be a bombshell. For Dreyfus, ai was notable for its false claims and undue optimism. Thought was not the same as computation, humans had properties like ‘ambiguity tolerance’ and unconscious instincts, and mental processes were not like, and could not be modelled by, formal digital, symbolic manipulations.