Please start by reading the following papers. After each, I've noted some of the points which I take to be important. Some of the ideas may seem naïve by now, but try to take them seriously - a lot has happened in 45 years! And when comparing attitudes to AI, note the dates carefully. In some of these references, the papers may be accompanied by commentaries which were written ten or twenty years later.
If you look at the bibliography at the end of these notes, it will seem frighteningly long! I am not asking you to read eveything in it - it contains all the optional footnoted references as well as the main reading. Unconventionally, I have referenced works by their titles and not their authors, to help you remember the former.
The first paper, by Turing, is [Computing Machinery and Intell]. Note the following:
I cite the brief reviews in [Mechn of Thought Processes: Report] and [Trends and Discoveries] to give an impression of the
variety of approaches already being taken by 1960, including both
neurally-inspired and symbolic methods. Note particularly Rosenblatt's
Perceptron. This is the forerunner of the back-propagation networks
which became so popular in the mid-Eighties and which you'll probably
cover in Edmund Rolls' tutorials.