SRI's neural-network group retooled toward symbolic AI to follow ARPA funding, not because perceptrons had been refuted

Mikel Olazaran's A Sociological History of the Neural Network Controversy (1993), built on direct interviews with the principals, documents that SRI's perceptron researchers did not abandon neural networks because the science had been settled against them. They abandoned it because ARPA money was flowing toward symbolic AI, and they retooled to catch it. Nils Nilsson, in his own words:

"We hired Bert Raphael from MIT who taught us LISP. We were interested in learning LISP programming, and that started to be more interesting than neural networks."

Raphael was a student of Marvin Minsky's — the group deliberately imported a rival paradigm's tools by hiring a rival paradigm's student to teach them. Charles Rosen, the SRI group's lead, describes spending three to four months brainstorming "what project shall we select" to get into the main fields of artificial intelligence, landing on the Shakey robot, and then spending "one year and a half to two" selling that program to ARPA — "to some of the people who didn't like perceptrons." The mechanism of closure here is funding-driven career redirection, not scientific refutation.

This is the sociological complement to the vault's technical account of the same period. Where claim-widrow-abandoned-multilayer-training-until-1985-backprop shows a group leaving because it could not train hidden layers, the SRI story shows a group leaving because the money moved — two different exit mechanisms behind the same "symbolic AI won" folk summary. It sharpens myth-perceptrons-book-killed-connectionism by supplying primary-interview evidence for the "social stall" (funding, career incentives) as distinct from the technical blocker, and it sits alongside the broad funding-shock account in claim-lighthill-1973-blamed-combinatorial-explosion and the field's paradigm split in claim-dreyfus-critique-targeted-symbolic-ai-not-neural-nets. See moc-backpropagation-origins.