Elephants Don't Play Chess
Brooks argued that intelligence grew out of movement and survival rather than symbolic reasoning, so it must be built from the bottom up.
Why it matters
The most direct statement that the field had spent forty years on the wrong problem, and it came from inside, from MIT.
The title points at an elephant solving hard real-world problems without any logic. Brooks notes the proportion: evolution spent billions of years on perception and movement and only millions on language and reasoning, so the first is the hard part. It is the same thesis as Moravec's paradox, stated as an engineering programme rather than an observation.