An excerpt from “Today’s Computers, Intelligent Machines and Our Future,” an essay by roboticist Hans Moravec from 1978, before Deep Blue was beating Kasparov in chess and Watson was wowing Trebek on Jeopardy!: 

“In the thirty years since then computers have become vastly more capable, but the goal of human performance in most areas seems as elusive as ever, in spite of a great deal of effort. The last ten years, in particular, has seen thousands of people years devoted directly to the problem, referred to as Artificial Intelligence or AI. Attempts have been made to develop computer programs which do mathematics, computer programming and common sense reasoning, are able to understand natural languages and interpret scenes seen through cameras and spoken language heard through microphones and to play games humans find challenging.

 There has been some progress. Samuel’s checker program can occasionally beat checker champions. Chess programs regularly play at good amateur level, and in March 1977 a chess program from Northwestern University, running on a CDC Cyber-176 (which is about 20 times as fast as previous computers used to play chess) won the Minnesota Open Championship, against a slate of class A and expert players. A ten year effort at MIT has produced a system, Mathlab, capable of doing symbolic algebra, trigonometry and calculus operations better in many ways than most humans experienced in those fields. Programs exist which can understand English sentences with restricted grammar and vocabulary, given the letter sequence, or interpret spoken commands from hundred word vocabularies. Some can do very simple visual inspection tasks, such as deciding whether or not a screw is at the end of a shaft. The most difficult tasks to automate, for which computer performance to date has been most disappointing, are those that humans do most naturally, such as seeing, hearing and common sense reasoning. 

A major reason for the difficulty has become very clear to me in the course of my work on computer vision. It is simply that the machines with which we are working are still a hundred thousand to a million times too slow to match the performance of human nervous systems in those functions for which humans are specially wired. This enormous discrepancy is distorting our work, creating problems where there are none, making others impossibly difficult, and generally causing effort to be misdirected.”