Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Rise of Artificial Intelligence & Wonders What Will Happen to Humanity (1978)

We now live in the midst of an artificial-intelligence boom, but it’s hardly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been subject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the early nineteen-fifties. Eventually, those busts — which occurred when realizable AI technology failed to live up to the hype of the boom — became so long and so thoroughgoing that each was declared an “AI winter” of scant research funding and public interest. Yet even deep into one such fa