The Electric: Is That Chill in the Air ‘EV Winter’?

In a 1950 paper, British mathematician Alan Turing posed the provocative question “Can machines think?”—firing up fellow computing experts to devise one that could. In 1958, researchers on contract with the U.S. Navy said they were just a year away from revealing a machine that would “walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence,” The New York Times reported at the time. But their self-imposed deadline came and went. Decades passed, funding dried up, and artificial intelligence became the butt of mockery—the few researchers who stuck it out dubbed their long stretches of lonely misery “AI winter.”