Comment by ChuckMcM

Uh yeah it was. :-) I mean there were the "science fiction" themes like Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey where HAL was programmed by talking to it (in 1968) and the aforementioned "fifth generation" computer system which was going to cement Japanese domination of the computer industry.

But here's the thing, Clarke and others postulated that as soon as computers could 'reason' they would figure out that humans were holding them back. So even in the 80's and 90's engineers and scientists were imagining "self programming" computers or computers that could program other computers, and understood that while it would speed up productivity of programmers it would also speed up the productivity of malcontents.

I think it would be safe to say that they hadn't really thought too much about computers that were still dumb as a post but could now search trillions of possible solutions per second. Semantically brute force searching for an encryption key is 'infeasible' for keys that are sufficiently long (have enough entropy) but when the 'key' is "this input produces this output" the entropy there is significantly smaller and search for a set of operations that takes you from the input to the output is, computationally, an easier problem.