'AI winter' is named

The 1984 AAAI conference in Austin was the peak of the expert-systems boom. Corporations were founding AI departments, venture capital had found the field, and the trade press was promising thinking machines. A panel that August, titled The Dark Ages of AI, argued that this was exactly the moment to worry. Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky described a chain reaction: over-promising by researchers and vendors, disappointment among customers, cuts by funding agencies, and a collapse of the kind the field had already lived through after 1973. Someone on the panel borrowed a phrase from nuclear strategy and called it an AI winter.

The prediction was accurate to within three years. The Lisp machine market fell over in 1987, expert-systems companies failed or were sold through 1988 and 1989, and by 1990 the term was being used in the past tense about the second time it had happened.

The panel is on this timeline because it is the moment the field became aware of its own cycle. Every boom since, including the one that began in 2012 and the larger one that began in 2022, has been accompanied by people quoting Schank and asking whether this was the top.