The history seems drastically short-sighted, such that what it&#x27;s talking about makes no sense to me. Could someone explain what this is supposed to be about?<p>Here are my issues:<p>&gt; They believed it was possible to teach a machine to learn the same way a child does, through artificial neural networks that mimic the function of the human brain. In the process of teaching a machine to learn like a human, they figured there was likely a lot to discover about how humans learn as well.<p>That&#x27;s been part of AI thought for a very long time. In 1950 Alan Turing wrote (quoting from <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;loebner.net&#x2F;Prizef&#x2F;TuringArticle.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;loebner.net&#x2F;Prizef&#x2F;TuringArticle.html</a> ):<p>&gt; Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child&#x27;s?<p>or the work put into Cyc (from <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;cycorp-ai-2014-7?op=1&amp;IR=T" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;cycorp-ai-2014-7?op=1&amp;IR=T</a> ):<p>&gt; Cycorp&#x27;s product, Cyc, isn&#x27;t &quot;programmed&quot; in the conventional sense. It&#x27;s much more accurate to say it&#x27;s being &quot;taught.&quot; Lenat told us that most people think of computer programs as &quot;procedural, [like] a flowchart,&quot; but building Cyc is &quot;much more like educating a child.&quot;<p>This is part of the constructivist approach to AI. See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aisb.org.uk&#x2F;convention&#x2F;aisb08&#x2F;proc&#x2F;proceedings&#x2F;12%20Computing%20and%20Philosophy&#x2F;04.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aisb.org.uk&#x2F;convention&#x2F;aisb08&#x2F;proc&#x2F;proceedings&#x2F;12...</a> for a quickly found example of a constructivist vs. non-constructivist approach with respect to AI.<p>Nor is the idea of using neural nets for this anything new. Indeed, neural nets and AI date from the 1950s.<p>Thus, the next paragraph makes little sense:<p>&gt; The consensus among most computer scientists at the time was that this was nuts. The way to get a computer to do something was to program it to do it, not ask it to learn the task itself. If he had been a computer scientist, Silverman probably would have thanked them for their time and moved on.<p>I don&#x27;t know what &quot;nuts&quot; means here. Was the consensus of most computer scientists that the constructivist approach wouldn&#x27;t work? I know that subsumption architecture and genetic algorithms were a hot topic 20 years ago, so it doesn&#x27;t makes sense that people thought that &#x27;program it&#x27; was the only effective solution.<p>&gt; Silverman convinced CIFAR to give that band of self-identified weirdoes about $10 million over 10 years, making it pretty much the only organization at the time to back the research of artificial neural networks.<p>I have no idea what this means. The article suggests a timeframe starting in 2004. I remember people doing back-prop in the early 1990s. I did some consulting work integrating an ANN prediction system around 2005. A Google Scholar search ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=sv&amp;q=artificial+neural+net&amp;btnG=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=sv&amp;q=artificial+neural...</a> ) shows plenty of diverse research in ANNs before 2000 .