It seems obvious now, but back then it wasn't obvious that "AI" required a learning system at all. Knowledge Engineering was a popular approach, and rules based systems running over knowledge bases were supposed to be the path to AI.

And don't forget Minsky's decimation of neural network research at the start of the 1970s [1], which led to major research centers like MIT ignoring them completely.

[1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26629