The years after the Dartmouth conference were an era of discovery, of sprinting across new ground. The programs that were developed during this time were, to most people, simply "astonishing": computers were solving algebra word problems, proving theorems in geometry and learning to speak English.
Few at the time would have believed that such "intelligent" behavior by machines was possible at all. Researchers expressed an intense optimism in private and in print, predicting that a fully intelligent machine would be built in less than 20 years.
That brings the earliest predictions to the range 1976-1994.
(Textual description of the part of their dataset that includes reasoning as to how the prediction was reached at http://aiimpacts.org/list-of-analyses-of-time-to-human-level.... That list is a bit less optimistic. Excel sheets for the full dataset also are available from that site)
The golden years 1956–1974
The years after the Dartmouth conference were an era of discovery, of sprinting across new ground. The programs that were developed during this time were, to most people, simply "astonishing": computers were solving algebra word problems, proving theorems in geometry and learning to speak English.
Few at the time would have believed that such "intelligent" behavior by machines was possible at all. Researchers expressed an intense optimism in private and in print, predicting that a fully intelligent machine would be built in less than 20 years.
That brings the earliest predictions to the range 1976-1994.
http://aiimpacts.org/category/ai-timelines/predictions-of-hu... has better data. It puts the earliest prediction at 1978 (but also has one predicting 1973-1985). Apparently, Minsky, in 1967, predicted "within a generation"
(Textual description of the part of their dataset that includes reasoning as to how the prediction was reached at http://aiimpacts.org/list-of-analyses-of-time-to-human-level.... That list is a bit less optimistic. Excel sheets for the full dataset also are available from that site)