On AI’s 70th Birthday, A Warning About Excessive Regulation | American Enterprise Institute

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Seventy years ago, this summer, a small group of scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to explore a radical question: Could machines learn, reason and solve problems in ways that resembled human intelligence?

The workshop gave us the term “artificial intelligence” and launched one of the most consequential technological revolutions in history. Today, governments, universities and technology companies around the world are celebrating AI’s 70th birthday and competing to be AI leaders.

But there is an irony buried in AI’s origin story.

The same year that the Dartmouth workshop introduced a new vision for computing, the federal government was imposing restrictions on two of the companies most closely connected to that vision: AT&T and IBM.

Claude Shannon of Bell Labs, one of the principal architects of modern information theory and a co-author of the Dartmouth workshop, worked for AT&T’s Bell Labs. IBM researchers were among the pioneers exploring machine learning and advanced computing. Yet in 1956, the Justice Department concluded antitrust actions against both companies. AT&T was restricted to its regulated communications business and required to broadly license its patents. IBM was compelled to alter its business model, including offering its machines for sale rather than relying primarily on leasing arrangements that gave the company constant customer engagement.

Whether those decrees slowed the development of artificial intelligence is impossible to know. History does not provide control groups. Bell Labs continued to produce groundbreaking research, and IBM remained a central force in computing innovation.

The more important lesson lies elsewhere.

The antitrust actions reflected a view of the economy shaped by the industrial age. Regulators believed they saw concentrated market power in telephony and tabulating machines and sought to restructure those industries to create more competition. Their focus was on the most…

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