While researching something else, I ran across Richard L. Rosenbaum’s “Artificial Intelligence: What Is It?” in Byte (Apr. 1977, pp. 50-56), which has this pertinent passage regarding the early hope of natural language processing (NLP) and researchers’ eventual apprehension of the challenges to achieving it (emphasis added):
“In the early days of modern computers, the early 50s, one of the great optimistic hopes was to have automatic machine translation of text. It was thought that all you would have to do is have enough memory to store a dictionary. Today there are not many knowledgeable people who would make such a boast. The problem with writing a translating system is the immense complexity of natural language. . . . A related problem is natural language comprehension. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could converse with our processors in English instead of BASIC or assembly language? Unfortunately, the same problems are faced in this task” (Rosenbaum 56).
Also, I’ve made some updates to the Generative AI and Pedagogy Bibliography with some new books peppered throughout the list and news articles about the Biden administration’s push for AI regulation in the Ethics section.
If you make use of the bibliography in your research, please include a footnote or drop me an email–thank you!
