"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts

Or earlier in this article Present Inefficiency in the Jury System in The Law Magazine, Or, Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence (1849):

While therefore we would desire our juries to be moulded after a higher standard, we do not mean that we want in them a superior degree of particular, partial or artificial intelligence, but a legal guarantee for greater general and judicial talent.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the following proposal as the first use of the phrase "artificial intelligence":

"A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence" authored by John McCarthy [credited with coining the phrase], Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon.

The proposal aimed to study if machines could use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.

The conference was actually held from June 19 to August 16, 1956, at Dartmouth College; widely recognized as the birth of AI as a field of study.