I’ve pointed out the cases of Moravec (1997) and Shane Legg pre-DM (~2009) as saying pretty much exactly that and in the case of Legg, influencing his DM founding timeline. I am pretty sure that if you were able to go back and do a thorough survey of the connectionist literature and influenced people, you’d find more instances.
For example, yesterday I was collating my links on AI Dungeon and I ran into a 1989 text adventure talk by Doug Sharp mostly about his King of Chicago & simple world/narrative simulation approach to IF, where before discussing King, to my shock, he casually drops in Moravec’s 1988 Mind Children’s forecast for human-level compute in 2030 and compute as a prerequisite for “having this AI problem licked”, and notes
When true AI does arrive, I think it will pretty much sweep away the groundwork we’re laying today and set up its own rules for interaction, narration, and a few other details. In the meantime, there’s a lot of fun to be had making the best games we can with our primitive machines and methods.
Well, I can’t disagree with that! It’s only 2021, and AI Dungeon and its imitators owe essentially nothing to the last 46 years of IF, and have to invent methodologies for neural text games from scratch. But it’s not very fun to just give up in 1986 and say you’ll sit around twiddling your thumbs for the next 33 years or so, waiting for Moore’s law to give you the most rudimentary NNs you can start experimenting with...
I’ve pointed out the cases of Moravec (1997) and Shane Legg pre-DM (~2009) as saying pretty much exactly that and in the case of Legg, influencing his DM founding timeline. I am pretty sure that if you were able to go back and do a thorough survey of the connectionist literature and influenced people, you’d find more instances.
For example, yesterday I was collating my links on AI Dungeon and I ran into a 1989 text adventure talk by Doug Sharp mostly about his King of Chicago & simple world/narrative simulation approach to IF, where before discussing King, to my shock, he casually drops in Moravec’s 1988 Mind Children’s forecast for human-level compute in 2030 and compute as a prerequisite for “having this AI problem licked”, and notes
Well, I can’t disagree with that! It’s only 2021, and AI Dungeon and its imitators owe essentially nothing to the last 46 years of IF, and have to invent methodologies for neural text games from scratch. But it’s not very fun to just give up in 1986 and say you’ll sit around twiddling your thumbs for the next 33 years or so, waiting for Moore’s law to give you the most rudimentary NNs you can start experimenting with...