A few years ago, a typewriter came to me—a Smith-Corona electric portable, I believe—with a variety of papers inside the case. They included a brief report on artificial intelligence, written by Sharon T. in 1988. It's just a few pages long, but it offers an interesting glimpse of the state of the field at the time. I hadn't realized that neural networks were already a topic of intense interest then. Now, almost 40 years later, AI is finally realizing the promises people were making in the late '80s—for better or worse. For one thing, it can generate a report like...