In 1943, while the world’s brightest physicists split atoms for the Manhattan Project, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner led his own secret government project to win World War II.
Skinner did not aim to build a new class of larger, more destructive weapons. Rather, he wanted to make conventional bombs more precise. The idea struck him as he gazed out the window of his train on the way to an academic conference. “I saw a flock of birds lifting and wheeling in formation as they flew alongside the train,” he wrote. “Suddenly I saw them as ‘devices’ with excellent vision and maneuverability. Could they not guide a missile?”
Skinner started his missile research with crows, but the brainy black birds proved intractable. So he went to a local shop that sold pigeons to Chinese restaurants, and “Project Pigeon” was born. Though ordinary pigeons, Columba livia, were no one’s idea of clever animals, they proved remarkably cooperative subjects in the lab. Skinner rewarded the birds with food for pecking at the right target on aerial photographs—and eventually planned to strap the birds into a device in the nose of a warhead, which they would steer by pecking at the target on a live image projected through a lens onto a screen.
The military never deployed Skinner’s kamikaze pigeons, but his experiments convinced him that the pigeon was “an extremely reliable instrument” for studying the underlying processes of learning. “We have used pigeons, not because the pigeon is an intelligent bird, but because it is a practical one and can be made into a machine,” he said in 1944.
People looking for precursors to artificial intelligence often point to science fiction by authors like Isaac Asimov or thought experiments like the Turing test. But an equally important, if surprising and less appreciated, forerunner is Skinner’s research with pigeons in the middle of the 20th century. Skinner believed that association—learning, through trial and error, to link an action with a punishment or reward—was the building block of every behavior, not just in pigeons but in all living organisms, including human beings. His “behaviorist” theories fell out of favor with psychologists and animal researchers in the 1960s but were taken up by computer scientists who eventually provided the foundation for many of the artificial-intelligence tools from leading firms like Google and OpenAI.
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