Whatever Happened to Good Old-Fashioned AI?
 
It was the first thing people saw as they drew close: a shining, stainless steel globe called the Unisphere, rising a full twelve stories into the air. Around it stood dozens of fountains, jetting streams of crystal-clear water into the skies of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in New York’s Queens borough. At various times during the day, a performer wearing a rocket outfit developed by the US military jetted past the giant globe—showing off man’s ability to rise above any and all challenges.
 
The year was 1964 and the site, the New York World’s Fair. During the course of the World’s Fair, an estimated 52 million people descended upon Flushing Meadows’ 650 acres of pavilions and public spaces. It was a celebration of a bright present for the United States and a tantalizing glimpse of an even brighter future: one covered with multilane motorways, glittering skyscrapers, moving pavements and underwater communities. Even the possibility of holiday resorts in space didn’t seem out of reach for a country like the United States, which just five years later would successfully send man to the Moon. New York City’s “Master Builder” Robert Moses referred to the 1964 World’s Fair as “the Olympics of Progress.”
 
Wherever you looked there was some reminder of America’s post-war global dominance. The Ford Motor Company chose the World’s Fair to unveil its latest automobile, the Ford Mustang, which rapidly became one of history’s best-selling cars. New York’s Sinclair Oil Corporation exhibited “Dinoland,” an animatronic recreation of the Mesozoic age, in which Sinclair Oil’s brontosaurus corporate mascot towered over every other prehistoric beast. At the NASA pavilion, fairgoers had the chance to glimpse a fifty-one-foot replica of the Saturn V rocket ship boat-tail, soon to help the Apollo space missions reach the stars. At the Port Authority Building, people lined up to see architects’ models of the spectacular “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center, which was set to break ground two years later in 1966.
 
Today, many of these advances evoke a nostalgic sense of technological progress. In all their “bigger, taller, heavier” grandeur, they speak to the final days of an age that was, unbeknownst to attendees of the fair, coming to a close. The Age of Industry was on its way out, to be superseded by the personal computer– driven Age of Information. For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that.
 
As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM. IBM’s mission for the 1964 World’s Fair was to cement computers (and more specifically Artificial Intelligence) in the public consciousness, alongside better-known wonders like space rockets and nuclear reactors. To this end, the company selected the fair as the venue to introduce its new System/360 series of computer mainframes: machines supposedly powerful enough to build the first prototype for a sentient computer.
 
IBM’s centerpiece at the World’s Fair was a giant, egg-shaped pavilion, designed by the celebrated husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames. The size of a blimp, the egg was erected on a forest of forty-five stylized, thirty-two-foot-tall sheet metal trees; a total of 14,000 gray and green Plexiglas leaves fanning out to create a sizable, one-acre canopy. Reachable only via a specially installed hydraulic lift, the egg welcomed in excited fair attendees so that they could sit in a high-tech screening room and watch a video on the future of Artificial Intelligence. “See it, THINK, and marvel at the mind of man and his machine,” wrote one giddy reviewer, borrowing the “Think” tagline that had been IBM’s since the 1920s.
 
IBM showed off several impressive technologies at the event. One was a groundbreaking handwriting recognition computer, which the official fair brochure referred to as an “Optical Scanning and Information Retrieval” system. This demo allowed visitors to write an historical date of their choosing (post-1851) in their own handwriting on a small card. That card was then fed into an “optical character reader,” where it was converted into digital form, and then relayed once more to a state-of-the-art IBM 1460 computer system. Major news events were stored on disk in a vast database and the results were then printed onto a commemorative punch-card for the amazement of the user. A surviving punch-card reads as follows:
THE FOLLOWING NEWS EVENT WAS REPORTED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE DATE THAT YOU REQUESTED:
 
APRIL 14, 1963: 30,000 PILGRIMS VISIT JERUSALEM FOR EASTER; POPE JOHN XXIII PRAYS FOR TRUTH & LOVE IN MAN.
 
Should a person try and predict the future—as, of course, some wag did on the very first day—the punch-card noted: “Since this date is still in the future, we will not have access to the events of this day for [insert number] days.”
 
Another demo featured a mechanized puppet show, apparently “fashioned after eighteenth-century prototypes,” depicting Sherlock Holmes solving a case using computer logic.
 
Perhaps most impressive of all, however, was a computer that bridged the seemingly unassailable gap between the United States and Soviet Union by translating effortlessly (or what appeared to be effortlessly) between English and Russian. This miraculous technology was achieved thanks to a dedicated data connection between the World’s Fair’s IBM exhibit and a powerful IBM mainframe computer 114 miles away in Kingston, New York, carrying out the heavy lifting.
 
Machine translation was a simple, but brilliant, summation of how computers’ clear-thinking vision would usher us toward utopia. The politicians may not have been able to end the Cold War, but they were only human—and with that came all the failings one might expect. Senators, generals and even presidents were severely lacking in what academics were just starting to call “machine intelligence.” Couldn’t smart machines do better? At the 1964 World’s Fair, an excitable public was being brought up to date on the most optimistic vision of researchers. Artificial Intelligence brought with it the suggestion that, if only the innermost mysteries of the human brain could be eked out and replicated inside a machine, global harmony was somehow assured.
 
Nothing summed this up better than the official strapline of the fair: “Peace Through Understanding.”
 
Predicting the Future
 
Two things stand out about the vision of Artificial Intelligence as expressed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The first is how bullish everyone was about the future...