[Animats]

Ah. The linked paper goes into that in more detail.

This was a hot idea right after WWII because servomechanisms were finally working. In movies of early WWII naval gunnery, you see people turning cranks to get two arrows on a a dial to match. By late WWII, that's become automatic. Anti-aircraft guns are hitting the target more of the time. Early war air gunner training.[1] Late war air gunner training - the computer does the hard part.[2] Never before had that much mechanized feedback smarts been applied to tough real-world problems.

This sort of thing generated early AI enthusiasm. Machines can think! AGI Real Soon Now! Hence the "cybernetics" movement. That lasted about a decade. They needed another nine orders of magnitude of compute power. Psychology picked up on this concept, but didn't do much with it.

Looks like it's coming around again.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWYqu1Il9Ps

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJExsIp4yO8