"The Nation 's reviewer, Max Black, a Cornell philosophy professor, praised von Neumann's earlier formulation of game theory as "one of the intellectual monuments of our time." Had he lived longer, Black lamented, the scientist "might have constructed an even more important theory of computing machines. Such 'artificial brains' may eventually transform our culture, but our theoretical grasp of their underlying principles is still relatively crude and unsystematic.""
"Black did not mention von Neumann's ties to the military-industrial complex (a term coined three years later by President Dwight D. Eisenhower). A fierce anti-communist, von Neumann had played a critical role in the Manhattan Project and later advocated for the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles large enough to carry hydrogen bombs. Had he lived longer, von Neumann would almost certainly have set his own supercomputer-like mind to figuring out how "artificial brains" could best be put to military use."
Concepts of artificial intelligence trace back to 1958 in connection with John von Neumann's The Computer and the Brain, which analogized early computers to the human mind. Max Black praised von Neumann's game-theory work as an intellectual monument while warning that theoretical understanding of 'artificial brains' remained crude. Von Neumann's career included the Manhattan Project and advocacy for large intercontinental ballistic missiles, linking computational thinking to military aims. By the early 1980s, defense and intelligence projects pursued computing systems to process information, formulate hypotheses, and develop robots intended to replace human roles.
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