Overview
The MIT AI Lab (later merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to form CSAIL in 2003) was where Agre did his PhD and postdoctoral work from approximately 1981 to 1992. This was the institutional setting for his formative intellectual development — both his technical training in AI and his growing disillusionment with the field's foundational assumptions.
The AI Lab in the 1980s was a hotbed of competing approaches: the classical symbolic AI tradition (Minsky, McCarthy's legacy), the newer connectionist wave, Brooks's behavior-based robotics, and the beginnings of situated cognition. Agre's work emerged from and against this milieu.