That same year, New Scientist publishes an equally hopeful, and slightly more sober, article called “Machines Which Learn.”6 “When machines are required to perform complicated tasks it would often be useful to incorporate devices whose precise mode of operation is not specified initially,” they write, “but which learn from experience how to do what is required. It would then be possible to produce machines to do jobs which have not been fully analysed because of their complexity. It seems likely that learning machines will play a part in such projects as the mechanical translation of languages and the automatic recognition of speech and of visual patterns.”

Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, loc. 30977