Professor Sir James Lighthill argues that The General-Purpose Robot is a Mirage

About 20 years ago the development of computers seemed to offer a means of endowing machines with artificial intelligence. Ambitious predictions were made: by the year 2000, said some, robots will be able to compete with - and even outstrip - human beings over a wide range of activities.
Twenty years later, science fiction goes on featuring humanoid robots but, as a scientific proposition, are these dreams fading?
Sir James Lighthill, Lucasian Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cambridge, is very pessimistic about the possibility of giving robots anything like a human intelligence by using computers - even the very largest.
Sir James argues his case in the theatre of the Royal Institution, London
with:
Richard Gregory, Professor of Neuropsychology, Bristol University
John McCarthy, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, USA
Donald Michie, Professor of Machine Intelligence, Edinburgh University
and an invited audience
Chairman Professor Sir George Porter

(Colour)