LISP Comes of Age (1980)

Commenters focused on a personal, retrospective account of attending the 1980 AAAI conference and the first LISP conference, as recounted by Steve. He described encounters at Xerox PARC that inspired later personal projects, dinners with thinkers like Doug Hofstadter and Scott Kim, meetings with science fiction authors, the FORTH subculture, and the exuberant, early-AI culture that he found both thrilling and premature. He also told anecdotes about campus life that included catching a prowler and dealing with campus police, and he explained that his cultural-philosophical write-up was rejected by his editor in favor of a technical LISP piece, though a 2018 scan revived the manuscript.

Commenters took two main tacks: nostalgia and historical color versus a push for technical or existential framing. One commenter emphasized the cultural and human side of early LISP and AI, while others highlighted later follow-ups and debates about AI’s future - citing a later conference titled Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100? - which signals a strand of concern about long-term implications. Where opinion divides is clear: some value memoir-style, community-focused histories, while others prefer technical analysis or broader, sometimes alarmist, questions about AI’s trajectory.