The term “artificial intelligence”…does this pre-date the semiconductor?
- Jinx
The term “artificial intelligence”…does this pre-date the semiconductor?
The term was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/artificial_intelligence.html
According to this page:
In a talk McCarthy gave at my university recently, he made the comment that his proposal was probably one of the grossest underestimates of the difficulty of a problem in the history of mankind.
To actually address the OP’s question one has to also address the issue of when did the “semiconductor” come into existence?
Transistors were invented in the 40s and were coincidentally well on the way to replacing vaccum tubes for electronic computing purposes around the time that McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence.”
If one wants to ignore the context of the question, crude, poorly-understood semiconductors had already been used for decades by radio enthusiasts.