[pcwalton]

> I bet if you time traveled and showed Siri/Cortana to an AI researcher from 1960 they’d be incredibly disappointed.

It's a common misconception that the 1960s and 1970s were a time of unbridled enthusiasm in AI. In fact, there was a ton of pessimism back then too: for example, ALPAC [1] was so pessimistic about the future of natural language processing that it got the US government to pull most of its funding.

I think if you were to show Siri, Alexa, etc. to some of those folks they'd be pleased that we've gotten as far as we have, while acknowledging the obvious fact that there's plenty more to do.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALPAC