The term “Artificial Intelligence” (AI for short) was coined by John McCarthy (1927-2011), an American computer scientist widely considered one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence. The first documented use of the term appeared in 1955, in a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation titled “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” co-authored by McCarthy along with Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). At that time, McCarthy was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College and only 28 years old.
As an undergraduate student at Caltech, McCarthy studied psychology and automata theory (which would later evolve into computer science), though his degree was in mathematics. He completed his PhD in mathematics at Princeton, where he met Minsky, who was also a PhD student there. He met Shannon and Rochester during his brief positions at Bell Labs and IBM.
McCarthy was deeply fascinated with the possibility of creating thinking machines. He persuaded Minsky, Shannon, and Rochester to help organize a “2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence” for the summer of 1956, which became the famous Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of the field of AI.
Still, McCarthy’s choice of words was significant. “Artificial” was meant to indicate that the intelligence in question was manufactured rather than natural. “Intelligence” was deliberately broad and somewhat ambiguous, as it is difficult to define precisely, though it is a concept most people understand intuitively. This ambiguity proves to be both a blessing and a curse for the field, allowing for broad interpretation while also fueling ongoing debates about what counts as “true” AI.
Though McCarthy invented the term “Artificial Intelligence,” he later admitted that no one on the team really liked the name, because their goal was to create “genuine” intelligence, not “artificial.” “I had to call it something, so I called it ‘Artificial Intelligence.'” he remarked. His primary motivation for choosing the name was to distinguish this new field from the already existing field of Cybernetics. Cybernetics was a related but distinct area that studied “control and communications in the animal and the machine,” pioneered by American computer scientist Norbert Wiener (1894-1964).