Norbert Wiener: Dr. von Neumann and myself felt it desirable to hold a joint meeting of all those interested in what we now call cybernetics, and this meeting took place at Princeton in the late winter of 1943-1944. Engineers, physiologists, and mathematicians were all represented.

Claude Shannon: My fondest dream is to someday build a machine that really thinks, learns, communicates with humans and manipulates its environment in a fairly sophisticated way.

John McCarthy: As for myself, one of the reasons for inventing the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was to escape association with ‘cybernetics.’ ……  and I wished to avoid having either to accept Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.