>> The machine was still considered impressive decades later when the AI pioneer Norbert Wiener played against it at the 1951 Paris conference,[AI51][BRO21] [BRU1-4] which is now often viewed as the first conference on AI—though the expression "AI" was coined only later in 1956 at another conference in Dartmouth by John McCarthy. In fact, in 1951, much of what's now called AI was still called Cybernetics, with a focus very much in line with modern AI based on deep neural networks.[DL1-2][DEC]

Yeess, that's true. John McCarthy named "AI". And he wisely set the foundations of the field in the work of his thesis advisor, Alonzo Church, and the mathematicians of his generation, and the ones before, all the way back to Gödel.

That is to say, McCarthy set the foundations of AI in mathematical logic, the branch of mathematics that began in antiquity by Aristotle, flourished in the Middle Ages, the Rennaissance and the Enlightenment with the works of Arab and Christian scholars, reached its peak with Leibniz and was finally exalted with the work of Frege, Russel, Whitehead, Hilbert, Tarski, Skolem, Herbrand, Gödel himself, Church, Turing and others. The branch of mathematics that gave us digital computers, much like Jurgen Schmidhuber points out in his article. It is this work that is the only, well, logical, foundation of artificial intelligence. That suffices to explain why the earlier "cyerbnetics" branch of research fell through: because unlike McCarthy's AI, it was not grounded in solid theoretcial foundations that had already yielded such monumental results in mathematics and computer science.

And it is the foundations of AI in logic that AI research must return to, eventually, because it makes no sense to throw out two thousand years of progress, just because an intellectual midget by the name of Sir James Lighthill wrote a report. It would be even worse to throw out such richess of knowledge in return for the ability to put bunny noses and ears on selfies with "neural networks".