It's something you are supposed to learn in history class and there are many, many topics that you should learn from history at some point in your life. A news publication is not a replacement for history class and is probably one of the worst places to get a complete view of history.
To be clear, I have no problem with history podcasts (especially episodes about computing history), I just think they chose a poor lens for the subject matter. The military-industrial complex's influence on computing? Incredibly germane. But, and this is just how I heard it:
> You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
> I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.
> And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.
> ...And in effect, replace God with science?
To me, it felt as if the piece was dripping with contempt for people that actually started the work on the basis that they were nerds with the wrong identity.
Yeah, I wasn't really endorsing the program, just pointing out that "history doesn't belong in news" is a weird critique (not yours) of a history program.
Highschool history class taught me that America won the Vietnam War, because the teacher was a Nam vet and refused to believe otherwise. You can't count on schools to teach anything more than the biases of the teachers. Some of them are great but many are not.
