The question

Before anyone built a thinking machine, people argued about what thinking was. In 1936 Alan Turing described a machine that could carry out any procedure written as a finite list of steps, which gave "computation" a precise meaning. In 1943 Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts wrote the nerve cell as a switch: add up the inputs, fire if the total crosses a threshold. In 1950 Turing set the argument aside with a test: if a machine can hold a conversation you cannot tell from a person's, call it intelligent. In 1955 four researchers proposed a summer study at Dartmouth on the conjecture that every feature of intelligence could be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. They named the field before they had a method. That order of events matters. The definition of intelligence was never settled first; it was rewritten each time a new method arrived.