You are surrounded by GOFAI programs that work well every moment of your life. From air traffic control planning, do heuristics based compiler optimization. GOFAI has this problem where as soon as they solve a problem and get it working, it stops being “real AI” in the minds of the population writ large.
Philosophy has the same problem, as a field. Many fields of study have grown out of philosophy, but as soon as something is identified, people say “well that’s not Philosophy, that’s $X” … and then people act like philosophy is useless and hasn’t accomplished anything.
Go read an AI textbook from the 80’s. It was all about optimizations and heuristics. That was the field.
Now if you write a SAT solver or a code optimizer you do t call it AI. But those algorithms were invented by AI researchers back when the population as a whole considered these sorts of things to be intelligent behavior.
I agree with you that it was called AI by the field, but that’s also why the field was a joke imo.
Until LLMs everything casually called AI clearly wasn’t intelligence and the field was pretty uninteresting - looked like a deadend with no idea how to actually build intelligence. That changed around 2014, but it wasn’t because of GOFAI, it was because of a new approach.
