The 1960s

The generally optimistic view of technological progress in the films of the 1950s gives way to a much more pessimistic one in the 1960s. As the cold war escalated, it seemed clear that the global nuclear threat was, above all else, a technological problem, and that technology itself could not be its own solution. This idea lies at the heart of Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969), in which a supercomputer designed to control the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States decides it would do a better job than humans of ruling the planet, links up with its Soviet counterpart, and begins taking over the world, detonating nuclear warheads whenever humans disobey its orders. Computer technology also constituted a much more subtle and insidious threat than nuclear armageddon—it wasn’t just destructive, but dehumanizing. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), HAL-9000, a computer, seems more human than the emotionless, robotlike human crew of the Discovery. There is a poignancy in HAL’s "death"—"I’m afraid. I’m afraid. Stop, Dave. Will you stop? I’m afraid…"—that we don’t feel upon the deaths of the human astronauts. In Alphaville (1965), the bleak, futuristic title city is controlled by supercomputer, which has outlawed emotion and poetry.

Below are some representative films from the 1960s. Clicking on the title will take you to the filmography page, where you'll find a brief description of the film, links to other CyberCinema pages on that film, and a link to that film's entry in the Internet Movie Database.

Alphaville (1965) Cyborg 2087 (1966) The Billion Dollar Brain (1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) Colossus-The Forbin Project (1969)

Some AI Milestones from the 1960s*

1960

  • Defense computer mistakes moon for incoming missiles
  • LINC is the first "minicomputer" with integral CRT (Lincoln Labs)
  • Bar-Hillel publishes paper describing difficulty of machine translation

1961

  • DEC sells PDP-1 at $120,000
  • JFK proposes Project Apollo to Congress

1962

  • McCarthy moves to Stanford, founding Stanford AI Lab in 1963
  • First commercial industrial robots

1963

  • ARPA gives $2 million grant to MIT AI Lab
  • Sutherland's SKETCHPAD: drawing tool (CAD), constraint solver, WYSIWYG
  • M. Ross Quillian (semantic networks as a knowledge representation)
  • MIT Project MAC
  • Susumo Kuno's parser tested on "Time flies like an arrow"
  • Minsky's "Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence"

1964

  • DEC PDP-8 is first mass-produced minicomputer
  • IBM introduces 360 series
  • McLuhan writes "Understanding Media", predicts global electronic village
  • Bobrow's STUDENT (solves high-school algebra word problems)
  • Development of BBNLisp begins at BBN

1965

  • Buchanan, Feigenbaum & Lederberg begin DENDRAL expert system project
  • Godard's Alphaville released; Lemmy Caution defeats Alpha60, gets the girl, and makes the world safe for poets and lovers
  • Iva Sutherland demonstrates first head-mounted display (virtual reality)
  • Simon predicts "by 1985 machines will be capable of doing any work a man can do"
  • Dreyfus argues against the possibility of artificial intelligence

1967

  • Greenblatt's MacHack defeats Hubert Deyfus at chess
  • IBM separates hardware and software

1968

  • "HAL" stars in Clarke and Kubrick's 2001, goes crazy, kills astronaut, gets afraid, sings "Daisy"
  • Dijkstra's CACM letter "GO TO statement considered harmful"
  • Englebart demonstrates mouse, windows, multiple raster monitors
  • First PhD in computer science (Wexelblat at Univ. of Penn.)
  • Minsky's "Semantic Information Processing"
  • Chomsky and Halle's "The Sound Pattern of English"

1969

  • Alan Kay's Ph.D. thesis describes theoretical personal computer
  • The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes released; Disney goes digital
  • Minsky & Papert's "Perceptrons" (limits of single-layer neural networks)
  • Colossus: The Forbin Project released by MCA; guy who plays Victor on Young and the Restless fails to prevent his supercomputer from taking over the world and enslaving humanity

*Adapted from Mark Kantrowitz, "Milestones in the Development of Artificial Intelligence."
Click here for full-text version.

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