When I was in grad school in the 1990s, we talked about “surviving the AI winter.” Explosive, transformative progress in AI had been promised, but it wasn’t happening. Funders were fed up, and futurologists were getting frustrated and impatient. Of course it would all happen around 2022 — but we didn’t know that in 1995. We needed patience, and strategies for getting through the downturn.
Fast forward to today, and we now have the opposite problem: AI is explosively successful and popular. So much so that in the research world, everything else is getting squeezed out.