As a result of the second of these reports, which determined that AI was never going to work, PhDs in artificial intelligence like my classmate Geoff Hinton and myself spent ten years or so after graduation in psychology departments (in my case, at the Universities of Sussex and Warwick), until yet another report said AI was working after all and that Britain and the U.S. were falling behind Japan in this vital area.
i could get hired again in computer science, first briefly back at Edinburgh, and then at the University of Pennsylvania (i learned a lesson from this odyssey that i have tried to remember whenever i have been appointed to a committee to report on anything, which is that while reports very rarely do any good, they can very easily do a great deal of harm.)