The Alchemists Were Right

Seekers after the glitter of intelligence are misguided in trying to cast it in the base metal of computing.  There is an amusing epilogue to this analogy: in fact, the alchemists were right.  Lead can be converted into gold by a particle accelerator hurling appropriate beams at lead targets.  The AI visionaries may be right in the same way, and they are likely to be wrong in the same way.

-- Terry Winograd (1946 -), American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, "Thinking Machines: Can there be? Are we?", in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines (1991), ed. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, p. 216