We now live in the midst of an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence boom, but it’s hard­ly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been sub­ject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-fifties. Even­tu­al­ly, those busts — which occurred when real­iz­able AI tech­nol­o­gy failed to live up to the hype of the boom — became so long and so thor­ough­go­ing that each was declared an “AI win­ter” of scant research fund­ing and pub­lic inter­est. That is a ques­tion which the intel­li­gent com­put­er will force us to pay atten­tion to.”Few view­ers in 1978 would have spent much time pon­der­ing such mat­ters before. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les.